The most expensive decision is the one we never make

In 2021, a friend decided not to buy an apartment in Dubai. The market was climbing out of Covid and he did not believe it would last. A rebound, he called it. Everyone remembered 2008. He would rent another year, see whether the recovery held, and buy once it was clear.

He is still renting. The renewal notice arrives every spring and asks for more. The apartment he passed on would cost him considerably more today, and the deposit he saved for it has gone out in instalments to somebody else. He made no mistake anyone could point to. He simply made the same small decision over and over: not yet.

He was not wrong to be careful. He was wrong to assume that careful was free.

We are taught to respect patience. Good things take time. Wait for the right moment. It is sensible advice, and I have given it myself — to a colleague ready to resign over one bad quarter, to a business tempted into a new market only because a competitor got there first. Not every boat is ours to board.

But patient preparation and passive delay are remarkably hard to tell apart from the inside.

Patience is active. It observes, learns and strengthens a position, so that when the moment comes the person can meet it. Delay looks identical and does none of that work. It is fear presented as caution, indecision described as analysis, avoidance defended as waiting for the right time. What makes it so comfortable is that it asks nothing of us. A decision creates accountability. Waiting lets us keep believing that every option is still on the table.

But options expire, and they rarely announce it.

When corporate tax came to the UAE, businesses were given an unusually generous runway — years, not months, to restructure, reprice contracts and repair records that had never had to survive scrutiny. Many used that runway to wait. The reasoning was sound at every stage: guidance was still emerging, positions were unsettled, the systems could be upgraded later. Then the deadlines arrived, and two years of work was compressed into a few weeks at several times the cost.

Careers follow the same arc. Someone waits to be recognised, assuming loyalty is eventually rewarded, while colleagues ask for opportunities and acquire skills. For a while that patience reads as maturity. Past a certain point it simply hands the direction of a career to other people.

Part of the problem is that we examine only one side of the ledger. Deciding whether to act, we interrogate the risks of acting: what if it goes wrong, what if I am not ready. We almost never interrogate the risks of waiting. What becomes harder in another year? Which options quietly disappear? What will others gain while I remain undecided? Do the conditions I am waiting for realistically exist?

Those questions do not remove uncertainty. They make the cost of delay visible, which is usually enough.

We have also romanticised the right moment, imagining it as the point where confidence, opportunity, resources and certainty finally arrive together. In practice, most meaningful decisions are made when only some of them are present. People start businesses before every answer exists. They accept roles before feeling equal to them. Readiness is rarely what precedes action. It is what develops because we act.

Which points to a third option we use far too rarely. We treat these things as binary — act or wait — and forget that we can decide against something and close the matter. My friend could have concluded in 2021 that ownership was not for him, and stopped renewing the question along with the lease. Instead he kept the file open, and an open file demands attention every spring.

A decision declined and settled costs nothing further. A decision endlessly deferred charges rent of its own, in attention and second-guessing. Deciding against a thing is not a failure of nerve; it returns the energy that indecision consumes. A dozen matters permanently on the back burner is not caution. It is a way of never being fully present to any of them.

Not deciding is a decision. It is simply one made by default, and default decisions rarely serve us as well as deliberate ones. Sometimes the greatest regret is not the wrong move. It is that while waiting for certainty, we missed the moment when a move was still possible.

Asma Jan Muhammad is a chartered accountant and author based in Dubai