When to
Move?

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE

Not making a decision is a decision too.
Imagine you are standing before two roads. The first is unknown. So is the second. You stay where you are because you are afraid of choosing the wrong road.
A day passes. Then a week. Then a month. Then a year.
Eventually, you realize that without noticing it, you chose a third road. You chose to stay where you were.
We do this all the time. We stay in jobs we don’t like. We remain in relationships we know are hurting us. We postpone projects we believe in. And we put off important decisions because we are afraid they might turn out badly.
But we forget something simple:
Postponement itself has a cost.
If someone offered you an investment that required a thousand dollars, you would calculate the potential profit and loss. If you were considering buying a house, you would calculate the payments, the interest, and the risks.
But how often do you calculate the cost of not acting? How often do you ask yourself:
What will I lose if I act?
And what will I lose if I don’t?
Most people answer the first question. They forget the second.
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Years ago, there were two friends who worked at the same place. Both dreamed of starting a business of their own.
The first decided to start. The second decided to wait until he felt completely ready. He read countless books. He watched hundreds of videos. He took dozens of courses. And every time, he told himself:
“I still need to know more.”
Years later, the first friend had made many mistakes, lost money, and learned a great deal. The second had gained only one thing:

More time spent waiting.
The human brain dislikes loss. In fact, studies suggest that the pain of losing can often feel stronger than the pleasure of gaining. That is one reason the brain tries to avoid risk.
But the problem is that the brain makes the same mistake again and again:
It calculates the cost of action, but not the cost of inaction.
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A SIMPLE EXERCISE
Let’s try something simple.
Take a sheet of paper and divide it into two columns. In the first column, write: What will I lose if I act? In the second, write: What will I lose if I don’t act?
Then give each item a score from zero to ten.
Exercise note: Use your paper to list the possible losses under each heading and record a score beside each one. Total the scores separately.
Result: Action ______ / Inaction ______
Add up the scores in each column. The result does not automatically determine the decision; it simply reveals where the greater cost appears to lie based on your current assessment.
You will often discover that the picture you had been looking at was incomplete. And that brings us to the first rule of this book:
Don’t compare action with perfection. Compare the cost of action with the cost of inaction.

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CHAPTER ONE TOOL
Before making any decision, ask yourself these questions:

What will I gain if I act?

What will I lose if I act?

What will I gain if I don’t act?

What will I lose if I don’t act?

What will change after one month?

What will change after one year?

What will change after five years?

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SUMMARY
Not every action is a good decision. But inaction is not necessarily a safe decision either.
And often, the right question is not:
Should I act?
The better question is:
What will it cost me to stay where I am?

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PRACTICAL CASE — THE JOB OR THE BUSINESS?
A thirty-eight-year-old man has been working in a stable job for twelve years. He earns a decent salary—enough to cover his family’s basic needs.
But for years, he has felt that he is on a path that does not reflect who he is, and that his true capabilities go far beyond what he does every day.
He has an idea for a small business that he believes in, and he has solid experience in the field. But he is afraid to leave his job because the decision could affect his wife, his children, his savings, and his entire future.
Every night, he asks himself the same question:
Should I stay in my job, or leave and start my own business?
This is the question that will stay with us through Chapter Ten.
The man believed he had not made a decision yet. But then he realized something important:
He had already been making one. He had been choosing to stay.
Every morning, he woke up at the same time, went to the same place, repeated the same routine, and postponed the same question until another day.
He had assumed that all the risk lay in leaving. But he had never asked himself the opposite question:
What is the cost of staying?

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So he used the first tool in this book:
THE COST TABLE
He compared the cost of staying with the cost of leaving across five areas:
Money: Staying offered greater stability; leaving involved greater risk.
Time: Staying meant losing additional years; leaving offered a new opportunity.
Mental well-being: Staying meant ongoing pressure; leaving meant temporary stress.
Family: Staying offered temporary stability; leaving could bring changes.
Achieving his ambition: Staying offered a lower probability; leaving offered a higher probability.
He then moved to the next questions:
What will I lose if I leave?
What will I lose if I stay?
His answers looked like this:
If I leave:
I may lose my salary.
The business may fail.
I may have to start over.
If I stay:
I may lose more years of my life.
I may lose my motivation and energy.
I may regret it later.
The opportunity may disappear entirely.

That was when he began to realize that the situation was more

complicated than he had thought.

He was not comparing risk with safety. He was comparing two different

kinds of risk.

✦

Perhaps the real question isn’t: Should I leave? It’s: What price will I pay if

I stay?