This is the third and final article in a series drawn from a conversation on The Flywheel Effect podcast, where my co-host Brent and I spent an episode pulling business lessons from an unlikely source: a sailing memoir called The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, who sailed alone around the world in 1968. Part one was about the power of the deliberate pause. Part two was about breaking an overwhelming journey into the next manageable step. This one is about what happens when you’re moving and don’t realize it.
Here’s something that sounds simple but lands differently the more you sit with it: On a sailboat that isn’t heaved to, you are always moving. The wind and current are always acting on you. Even if you haven’t touched the wheel, even if you’re below deck eating lunch or catching a few hours of sleep, the boat is going somewhere. The question is never whether you’re moving. The question is whether you’re choosing where.
Moitessier understood this at a cellular level. Every moment on that voyage, he was either making an active decision or allowing the conditions to make one for him. There was no neutral.
The same is true in your business. And most of us underestimate how often we’re letting the conditions steer.
The Hidden Activity of Waiting
When business owners tell me they’re still deciding on something, I always ask how long they’ve been in that mode. Sometimes it’s weeks. Sometimes it’s months. Occasionally it’s years.
Here’s what’s true in every one of those cases: The business didn’t pause while they were deciding. It kept moving. Team members read the uncertainty and drew their own conclusions. Clients sensed the ambivalence and adjusted their expectations. Competitors made moves. Opportunities aged out. Waiting felt like stillness, but it wasn’t.
Also by Matt Bernath: Why Good Managers Fail at Innovation
Procrastination is its own decision. It just happens to be one you make by default rather than by design. Decisions made by default tend to take you somewhere you didn’t choose to go.
This isn’t meant to add pressure to an already full plate. Most integration business owners I know are not sitting still out of laziness. They’re waiting because they want to get it right. They’re gathering more information. They’re hoping the path will become clearer. Those are reasonable instincts. The trouble is that more information rarely makes a hard decision easy, and the path has a way of staying foggy until you start walking it.
You Can’t Undo the Past, But You Can Always Steer
One of the most freeing ideas I’ve carried with me from this book and from years of working with business owners is this: You can’t undo old decisions, but you always have the option to make a new one.
Moitessier couldn’t unwind the months he’d already spent at sea. He couldn’t unsail the miles behind him. But at every moment he had the ability to adjust course with whatever information he had right then. That’s all any of us have. The best decision available, made with today’s information, knowing that tomorrow’s information might lead somewhere different.
That reframe changes things considerably. The goal isn’t to make perfect decisions. The goal is to make good ones, stay attentive to what’s happening, and be willing to adjust when the conditions shift. Sailors call this reading the water. Business owners call it staying close to the business. The underlying skill is the same. What it requires is letting go of the idea that hesitating long enough will somehow eliminate the risk. It won’t. It just moves the risk around.
The Arc From Pause to Progress
Looking back at this series as a whole, there’s a progression worth naming.
Part one was about learning to stop. To deliberately create space when the pace of the business is outrunning your ability to think clearly. That pause isn’t weakness. It’s the move that makes everything else possible.
Part two was about focusing forward once you’ve caught your breath. Taking the overwhelming complexity of everything that needs to change and reducing it to the one thing that matters most right now. One cape at a time.
This piece is the natural endpoint of that arc. You’ve paused. You’ve identified the next step. Now you have to actually take it, which means accepting that you’re going to do so without complete information, without a guarantee of the outcome, and without the ability to go back.
That’s not a flaw in the process. That’s just what moving forward looks like.
What Moitessier Chose
Here’s the part of Moitessier’s story that Brent loves most. At some point deep in the voyage, with the race technically still winnable, Moitessier faced a genuine fork. He could turn north into the Atlantic, sail back to England, and almost certainly win. Or he could keep going east, past the Cape of Good Hope again, across the Indian Ocean, and all the way to Tahiti.
He chose Tahiti. He didn’t finish the race. He kept sailing.
The conventional read on that decision is that he abandoned the goal, but I think that misses what really happened. He made the most honest decision available to him with the information he had in that moment, which was a clear understanding of what he wanted and where he belonged. He didn’t defer it. He didn’t sail in circles hoping the answer would come. He committed.
Whether or not you’d make the same call, there’s something worth admiring in the clarity of it. He knew that indecision was its own course, so he chose.
A Simple Practice
If there’s something sitting on your desk right now that you’ve been circling for a while — a hire you haven’t made, a service you haven’t cut, a conversation you’ve been postponing — try this:
Write down what you’re waiting for. Not what you’re thinking about, but what specific piece of information or what specific condition would need to be true before you’d feel ready to decide. Then ask yourself honestly whether that thing is actually coming, or whether you’ve been waiting for a certainty that isn’t available.
Also by Matt Bernath: The Shiny Object Trap
Most of the time, the information you’re waiting for is already there. You just haven’t decided yet. Make the best call you can with what you have today. Stay attentive. Adjust when you need to. Keep moving.
That’s how Moitessier made it around the world. One decision at a time, with whatever the sea gave him.
This series was inspired by The Flywheel Effect podcast, where Brent Sonnek-Schmelz and I dig into ideas like these every episode. If something in these three articles resonated with you, there’s a lot more where that came from at growwithvital.com/podcast.
