There is a specific moment in a haircut where everything changes.
Before you sit down, every option is still open. You can walk past the salon, change your mind, pick somewhere else, decide today is not the day, or decide on a completely different style. The moment you are in the chair and say go ahead, that changes. A few seconds later, the first cut is made, and what was a free choice is now a situation you are working with.
Nothing in the world changed at that moment. What changed is that you crossed a line after which there is no going back. Whatever you did not think about before is now something you have to live with, work around, or fix - and fixing it costs more than thinking about it would have.
The length, the shape, whether this actually suits you, what it looks like from the back - all of that was available to think about before. You just didn't, because the decision hadn't landed yet. And now every one of those things has a price attached to it, measured in weeks of growing it back.
In business the commitment moment is just as recognisable - a contract signed, a deposit paid, a hire announced, a supplier relationship started. You know when you have sat down in the chair. The difference is that what you missed does not show up in the mirror straight away. It can stay out of sight for weeks or months, and by the time it surfaces you are deep enough in that dealing with it is a much bigger task than it would have been before you committed.
Bringing in a senior person is one of the clearest versions of this. The search takes time, the process takes time, and when the right person appears the instinct is to move. An offer goes out, it is accepted, the announcement goes to the team, maybe further. Three months in it becomes clear the fit is wrong - the working style, the culture, something in how this person operates that did not show up in the interviews.
Before the offer went out, that was a hiring decision with all options still open. After the announcement, it is a management situation, a team dynamic that has already started forming around this person, a potential exit cost, and a conversation that nobody wants to have. The oversight did not get harder to see. By the time it showed up, unwinding it had become a much bigger task than simply making a different choice would have been.
This is the moment you can see your haircut in the mirror. The thing you missed was always there. Sitting down in the chair is what made it expensive.
So before the chair - before the contract, the announcement, the first cut of any kind - one of the questions worth asking is not only whether this is the right move. It is: what am I about to make expensive to fix if I got something wrong here?
If this feels familiar, start here:
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