The Second Guess

Hello! 👋 

It’s Thursday, 4^th September 2025. Welcome back to Bold Efforts where I share my views on the future of work and living. Today’s note is about a quiet leak in modern work: the reflex to end every choice with let me check. It looks like diligence. It feels like safety. It drains your judgment. I am facing this myself everyday and want to correct it.

Visualise this: You open another tab. You send one more prompt. You paste a screenshot into a group chat that did not ask for it. You delay by a minute, then by a day, then by a sprint. By the time the decision lands, the moment that made it valuable has cooled. The work moves without you or stalls because of you. Both are losses.

This is not a plea to ignore facts. Verify claims. Audit numbers. The second guess is different. It is a habit loop that replaces courage with recursion. You are no longer gathering signal. You are asking for permission.

Why is this so common now? Because we work in a field of infinite feedback and very little quiet. Models compress the past into confident text. Dashboards stream numbers without the scent of the field. Social tools make judgment replayable and searchable. All of that is useful. None of that carries responsibility. To close that gap, people reach for one more check. The gap grows.

The first casualty is taste. Taste is the part of you that knows before the proof. It is built by exposure, practice, and scars. It does not grow if you never carry a call on your back. When taste weakens, leaders try to replace it with averages and experiments that answer small questions. The work becomes tidy and timid at the same time.

Next is ownership. Ownership is not a title. It is the weight of a bet with your name on it. When every decision is co‑signed by a model or a crowd, no one owns the outcome. Teams drift toward choices that offend no one. Products become beige. They are accurate, defensible, and forgettable.

Then amplitude fades. Amplitude is how far a single choice can move your market. It needs speed and faith. It needs the will to be early. The second guess kills amplitude because it turns every call into a committee and every minute into deferral. You start solving for consensus. You stop solving for impact.

There is a better way that keeps the power of tools and restores the power of judgment. I have started trying it and want you to give this a shot as well.

Decide on the record. Set a clear end to the search before you start it. When the window closes, choose. Write one sentence that states the bet and the reason: Because X, despite Y, we choose Z. Share it. Now the tool is a gauge, not a judge.

Let numbers move you after the fact, not before every step. You do not need to be right on day one. You need to be responsible on day two. Define the small set of metrics that will falsify your choice. If the world shows them, switch fast and in public. Confidence grows when people see you can both commit and improve.

Shorten the room. Seek input widely and authority narrowly. Many voices for ideas, few for the call. When people know who decides, they bring sharper thinking. When they do not, they bring hedges. Reduce the distance between the person who feels the customer and the person who signs the decision.

Rebuild your instrument rating. Treat models like cockpit gauges. They help you fly through clouds. They do not pick your destination. Ask for ranges and risks. Ask for the strongest counter‑argument. Ask for edge cases that break your plan. Use the tool to widen your map. Land the plane yourself.

Protect tempo. Work has a pace that creates pressure without panic. You get there by closing loops. Ship decisions at your mental peak. Put hard calls in the hours when you are clear. Keep the model out of those hours. Invite it back when you review, not when you choose.

Stop rehearsing in public. Chat threads turn every choice into a stage play. Bring the room together only when it changes the outcome. Otherwise, write and ship. Make postmortems normal and blame rare. People learn to decide when a clean miss costs less than paralysis.

Keep a small book of calls. Date. Decision. Reason. Result. What I missed. Review monthly. Patterns appear. You will see where a second guess would have wasted time, and where an early check would have saved pain. That is how you calibrate. Confidence is not a vibe. It is a record of earned bets.

If you lead, your team borrows your spine. If you hedge in every meeting and ask the model to bless what you already know, they will copy that. Ask for a point of view. Ask for the one move that matters. Ask for the price of waiting. Decide. Accept the consequences. People will follow clarity.

The best leaders ask models to test floors and ceilings, to search for violations, to stress plans with counterfactuals. They do not ask models to carry responsibility. Strategy is a bet on a world that does not exist yet. A model is a mirror of worlds that already happened. Respect both. Do not swap their roles.

The second guess wears the costume of caution. It is corrosion. It eats tempo, ownership, taste, and amplitude. You do not fix it by rejecting tools. You fix it by reclaiming the job only you can do: make the call, hold the bet, learn in public, and raise your aim with the next one. Thank you for reading. See you next week!

Best,
Kartik

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Who am I?
I’m Kartik, founder of Polynomial Studio, a holding company and product studio building AI-driven businesses for the future of work. The way we work and live is being rewritten. AI, remote work, and shifting economic forces are reshaping careers, businesses, and entire industries. The big question is where it’s all heading.

For the past eight years, I’ve been at the forefront of these shifts, working across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy. I’ve helped businesses navigate change and stay ahead of what’s next, always focused on understanding the forces shaping our future and how we can use them to build something better. Click here to know more about me.

Why Bold Efforts?
I started Bold Efforts because I believe work should fit into life, not the other way around. Too many people are stuck in outdated systems that don’t serve them. This newsletter is about challenging the status quo and making the effort to design work around life. It brings together bold ideas and actionable insights to help you build a healthier, more balanced relationship with work, leading to greater purpose and fulfillment. If you’re looking for fresh perspectives on how to work and live better, you’re in the right place.

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