Five Months and Two Days

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, where two sailmakers met the same two decisions in the same year, and took them in opposite orders.

Two sailmakers on one quay, the same flax canvas and the same beeswax.
The same long loft, the same twenty boats to keep in sail.
One spent five months on a question worth four evenings and a few candles.
One spent four evenings on that, and a fortnight on the question worth seven years.
By the third winter one loft stood empty and the other wanted a second pair of hands.
Both men were careful. So where does a careful man put his care?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two sailmakers, in a town I have never named. A loft above the chandlery with north windows and forty feet of scrubbed floor, because a mainsail cannot be judged folded. Chalk lines on the boards, a palm and a needle, twine drawn through beeswax until it runs sweet, and the smell of linseed and tar that never quite leaves a man's coat. Below, the fishing boats and twenty skippers wanting their canvas sound by March.

In the February of that year the same thought came to both of them. The fishing men could not climb the stairs in the working day, because the working day was when they were at sea. A torn jib, a cringle pulled out, reefing points chafed through: small work, cash work, and none of it coming in. Why not open the loft on a Thursday evening through the winter, with a lamp lit and the stove in?

The first sailmaker was not an idle man, and it does him no justice to call him a ditherer. He was the more careful of the two, and he set about it carefully. Would the men come, and come often enough to be worth his evenings? Would it teach them to expect evening work at ordinary prices? His wife was in favour and his brother in law was not. He meant to settle it in March, and in March there was a suit of sails for the ketch. He settled it in July, which is to say he never opened at all.

The second sailmaker opened on the first Thursday in February. He spent fourpence on candles and told four skippers on the quay. The first evening nobody came. The second, one man came with a staysail and stayed an hour talking. The third and fourth he did not sit down. By the end of the month he knew the answer, and it had cost him four evenings and fourpence.

In the September the old rope loft fell vacant, and both men were offered it on the same terms: seven years, no break, the first half year in advance. Twice the floor of either loft, and standing where the carts could reach the door.

Here the two men changed places. The second sailmaker took a fortnight, and spent it on his feet. He asked the harbourmaster what the quay had done in the bad winters and learned it had been under water twice in eleven years. He found the man who was leaving and asked him plainly why, and was told the deeper berths had gone downriver and the coasters with them. He wrote out what seven years of that rent came to, and said no.

The first sailmaker signed inside two days. He had been slow all year and knew it, another man was asking after the loft, and he was tired of being a man who could not make his mind up. By the third winter he was paying for a floor he could not fill, and the other had the fleet's winter repairs and twenty skippers who knew his stairs in the dark.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The question is never how big the decision is, it is whether you can walk it back. Sort your decisions by that and nothing else, and you will find you have been spending your caution almost entirely in the wrong place.

Most of what a small trade decides in a year can be undone by Friday. A trial opening. One order from a new supplier. A different line on the handbill. A price tried on the next three quotations. The worst that can happen is that you spend a little, learn the answer and stop, and the cost is known before you begin.

Against it, set the cost of taking five months. No bill arrives to say you had no Thursday trade from February to July, and that twenty skippers took their mending elsewhere. A decision put off looks free, and that is the whole reason it gets put off. It is paid in a currency that leaves no receipt.

There is a second thing in it, and it is the one that saves the months. For questions of this size, trying is not merely cheaper than thinking, it is better. No amount of sitting in a chair would have told the first sailmaker whether the fishing men would climb his stairs on a Thursday. The men did not know themselves. Four Thursdays knew. So when you catch yourself reasoning about what people will do, stop reasoning and put the rough thing in front of them. When the evenings are up and the answer is no, drop it, because the fourpence already spent gets no vote in what you do next.

Then give the saved months to the decisions that have no road back. You know them by four marks. The money cannot be recovered. The years cannot be recovered. Somebody else now holds a claim on you. Or your name is on it in a way that will outlast your opinion of it. A seven-year lease carries all four. Four candles carry none.

Two cautions. First, some decisions look reversible on paper and are not. A price announced and then withdrawn, a customer turned away, a lad taken on and let go in eight weeks: the paper can be torn up, but what the town now knows cannot be. Test every question twice, once for the money and once for the memory, and call it irreversible if either answer says so. Second, quick is not careless. A reversible decision still wants its ten minutes, spent on what the trial costs, when it ends, and what would make you stop. A trial with no end date is not a trial but a permanent habit acquired by accident.

Three questions, and the first wants a sheet of paper this evening:

1. What have you been carrying since the summer? Name the decision longest on your mind and write down what undoing it would cost, in money and in weeks. If that is a sum you could lose without flinching, you were never deliberating. You were postponing, and it has been charging you since.
2. What have you signed that you cannot get out of? Your lease, your notice periods, anything that renews itself while you are not looking. Most owners cannot state their own notice period from memory. Those are the papers your caution belongs to, and an hour reads all of them.
3. What would make you stop? Take the next thing you mean to try and write down, before you begin, the date it ends and the figure that decides it. Four Thursdays and six jobs. Three quotations at the new price. Then keep your word when the date comes.

The Answer to the Riddle

So where does a careful man put his care? Into the decisions that cannot be undone, and nowhere else. Both sailmakers had the same quantity of caution in them. The first spent his whole year's supply on a question a few candles would have answered, and came to the lease with none left and something to prove. The second bought his answer cheaply in February and still had his judgement about him in September. The careful man is not the one who thinks longest, but the one who thinks longest about what he will never be able to think about again.

The verse:

One weighed the candle half a year and signed the lease in haste,
One lit the candle Thursday night and learned what he was worth,
The door you may come back through costs a trial and a week,
The door that shuts behind you costs whatever you have got.

Until next time. Go and take the question you have been carrying since the summer, work out what undoing it would cost, and if the answer is small, settle it tonight.

P.S. Note the order the two decisions came in, because it is no accident of the story. A man who has been slow all year is the easiest man in the town to hurry. He is ashamed of his slowness, and the first chance to prove himself decisive arrives looking like a seven-year lease. Never settle a question you cannot undo in the week you have finally closed one you could.

Also in the archive: The Hour Nobody Claimed, The Coming Soon Page and The Fortnight in Pencil.