Good positioning never looks good at the time.
When you leave a prestigious role to build something nobody understands yet, it looks like a mistake. When you refuse the golden handcuffs, it looks like bad judgment. When you build on infrastructure you own instead of the fastest available path, it looks like inefficiency.
The logic becomes visible later. Once you see what options it preserved.
Good positions create options. Bad positions reduce them. Poor positioning destroys more than poor decisions do.
Buffett didn’t maximize returns in his 40s. He stayed positioned to capture decades of compounding. The strategy wasn’t obvious in 1970. It’s obvious now.
Building on infrastructure you control, not AWS, not Substack, not someone else’s platform, looks slow. Until the platform changes its terms.
The goal isn’t to make the right decision. It’s to stay in a position where good decisions remain available.