I was on a cliff, we needed to get down, and I couldn't tell if our rope reached the ground. It was getting dark and a bad situation was about to get worse. "Decision time!"

As the heaviest of the three climbers, I volunteered to go first, because if our rope held me, it would hold the other two.

I went over the edge with our extra gear, planning on figuring out some way down, quickly.

The way to move up is to gain more trust from those above you. Building this trust starts with consistently making critical decisions quickly and well. Here is a system I developed to make better decisions based on my time as an Amazon VP:

Good decision-making isn’t just about intelligence and judgment; it’s about having a repeatable system that can help you decide with speed and accuracy.

That system should help you:

1. Avoid false choices by expanding your option set

2. Surface and test your assumptions early

3. Seek the right expert input at the right altitude

4. Manage emotional bias before it clouds your thinking

5. Monitor outcomes with clear tripwires and signals

Too often, we force ourselves into suboptimal decisions because we fail to do the things above. We falsely feel the need to choose between two bad options, we don’t test assumptions, we go it alone, and we let our emotions hijack the process.

The goal of the system is to avoid those mistakes and open up opportunities for better decisions rather than locking ourselves into the bad ones.

In this week’s newsletter, I break down the exact framework I developed and how you can apply it to your own work.

Read the full post here: levelupwithethanevans.s…

As for my descent down the cliff, I used a variation of the same quick decision making to get us all off the mountain. We had started a climb, gotten halfway up, and realized that we were moving too slowly to finish the climb before dark. Given this, we then had to get down from the middle of the cliff face by constructing our own alternative way down.

From the process above:

a) We did consider options - keep going up, retrace the way we had come, or bail out over the nearby cliff edge. The cliff was fastest.

b) Our assumption was that the way we secured the rope would hold. We tugged on it (tested it) and then as the heaviest person, I went first.

c) We didn't have any experts handy, so we skipped this step.

d) I did freeze (emotion) at the cliff edge. My good friend gently said, "Ethan, it's getting dark." He got me moving before I could become paralyzed.

e) I had the extra gear in case things went wrong.

At first I could not tell if the rope was long enough or not. Loops of the rope had caught on trees and bushes, so I had to lower myself down, committing irrevocably to the descent, and untangle the mess.

Once that was done, I found that the rope stretched with my weight, just enough to get my feet in the ground. My friends followed and we walked down the mountainside in the dark.