The right call
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Most of the advice you’ve heard about decisions is about the wrong side of the equation.
In September 2000, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph flew to Dallas to meet with John Antioco, the CEO of Blockbuster. Netflix was bleeding money. They had 300,000 subscribers, no clear path to profitability, and the dot-com bubble was collapsing around them. They walked into Blockbuster’s headquarters with a proposal: buy us for fifty million dollars. We’ll handle your online business. You keep the stores. Together, we own everything.
Antioco had 9,000 stores, 60 million customers, and six billion dollars in annual revenue. Late fees alone brought in 800 million a year. Marc Randolph later wrote that when Hastings named the price, he watched Antioco’s lip twitch. The man was trying not to laugh.
Blockbuster said no. Netflix is now worth over 400 billion dollars. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
Everyone tells this story as a cautionary tale about bad decisions. Blockbuster blew it. They should have seen it coming. But I think the more interesting lesson is on the other side: Hastings and Randolph, sitting in that meeting, getting laughed at, decided to keep going. They could have folded. They were losing fifty million a year. The market was cratering. Every rational signal said quit. Instead they went back to California and made the call to bet everything on a streaming future that wouldn’t arrive for another seven years.
One decision. The right one.
The wrong obsession
We spend so much time talking about bad decisions. How the wrong hire can tank your team. How the wrong investment can set you back years. How one mistake can undo everything you’ve built. And some of that is true. Bad decisions have real consequences.
But I’ve started to notice that the people who spend most of their energy avoiding mistakes are seldom the ones who build something remarkable. They’re careful and measured and protected. And stuck, because the math of building a life or a business or a career is asymmetric in a way that most people never account for.
A bad decision can cost you. But a good decision, the right one at the right time, can change the entire trajectory. And the upside of one right call almost always outweighs the downside of several wrong ones. The problem is that we’ve trained ourselves to play defense, to scan for threats, to run every scenario through a filter of “what could go wrong.” Meanwhile the question that actually matters, “what could go right if I get this one call correct,” barely gets any airtime.
Think about your own life. The inflection points, the moments that actually changed things. How many of them came from avoiding a mistake? And how many came from making a single right call that you almost didn’t make?
