In recent years, I feel like we’ve been constantly forced to choose—agree or disagree, take a side, make a decision. Silence is often interpreted as agreement. But what about when we simply can’t decide? What about the time we deliberately step back and choose the third way, the forgotten one—withholding judgment?
Withholding judgment is freedom. It’s the tasting of a bottle of wine in a restaurant. When you order a bottle, you can send the wine back after your first sip. But you hold your judgment until that moment. Even after one sip, you might need a second. You swirl the glass, breathe in the aroma, and wait for the aftertaste. This pause, this act of holding back, isn’t indecision—it’s a deliberate choice until you gather enough information to decide confidently.
Withholding judgment offers us a chance to pause, assess, and experiment. It’s about opening the door to discovering overlooked possibilities and making better decisions in the long run. We must collect data and information to understand before forming any conclusions.
Any critical judgment demands a comprehensive understanding. This is also what Mortimer Adler captured perfectly in 1940, in his excellent book How to Read A Book:
You must be able to say, with reasonable certainty, “I understand,” before you can say any of the following things: “I agree,” or “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.” These three remarks exhaust all the critical positions you can take.
Adler’s insight is as relevant now as ever. We must pause and examine arguments holistically—not to agree or disagree but to understand them truly. This principle is especially crucial in today’s world, where the flow of information is rapid, overwhelming, and often misleading.
The Information Problem
How and where we gather information directly shapes the decisions we make. For decades, traditional media has been driving the direction of public belief, often mixing truths with half-truths and outright lies. Today, the Internet has taken its place as the medium, but it has inherited—and amplified—these same flaws. “The Internet,” as George Packer warns in The Atlantic, “which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.”
If objective truth is eroded once again, how can we confidently assess the decision and take steps—however small—based on what we read, hear, or watch online? The answer lies in strengthening our skepticism and remaining doubtful until the truth becomes undeniable.
This is easier said than done. Pausing a decision and seeking the truth to make a correct assessment can be frustrating. It requires patience, effort, and, perhaps most challenging of all, the ability to question our own biases.
The Nature of Truth
The objective truth, in its purest form, is rarely spoken aloud. It simply is. Truth does not require passionate advocacy—it exists independent of our belief in it. As Robert Pirsig explains in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
“No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow.”
When someone loudly insists on “the truth,” it often signals doubt disguised as conviction. By contrast, dogmatic enthusiasm is a sign of doubt dressed in certainty. Pirsig further says:
“When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
Most decisions we face are blurred by uncertainty and driven by competing narratives and opinions. The only responsible way forward is to withhold judgment through action—at least on the issues that truly matter—until we can find enough clarity to act wisely.
Finding Truth Through Action
Seeking the objective truth is overwhelming. The complexity of ideas, the amount of information, and the conflicting narratives circulating in our digital world can intimidate us. Instead of aiming to understand the entirety of a big idea at once, we can take small, deliberate steps forward—steps designed to test, learn, and uncover truths incrementally.
For instance, consider social welfare programs. Opinions about their effectiveness are often deeply divided along ideological lines. Rather than diving headfirst into partisan arguments or overwhelming ourselves with conflicting statistics, we can start by asking smaller, focused questions, such as: Which specific welfare programs exist in my country? What measurable outcomes do these programs produce (poverty reduction, health improvements, employment rates)? Armed with these questions, we can break the research into steps.
Even at work, small steps can help us uncover the unknown. Promotions are often big decisions that demand a lot of time and preparation. Imagine prematurely promoting someone only to find that they’re unfit for the role. Since we can’t reverse the promotion, a better approach would be to delegate and assign interim responsibilities, allowing them to try these responsibilities and prove their capabilities without committing to a full promotion. This way, both parties can “try before they buy.”
Another way to find a more minor decision at work, especially in product development, is actually a well-known one: experimenting. Instead of overthinking, planning endlessly, writing design documents, and collecting feedback on theoretical ideas, I’m all in on quickly building something small that agrees with the decision and something else that disagrees with it (though I must admit that the latter is rarely built). Hence, we learn the best decision as soon as possible and can refine our path.
By acting cautiously and experimenting with smaller decisions, we create opportunities to challenge assumptions, gather evidence, and refine our understanding. This approach transforms uncertainty into a tool for discovery—a way to progress while withholding judgment.
There is almost always a smaller decision hidden within the larger one, waiting to be uncovered. Once we find it, we can act on it—exploring it from every angle, testing it by moving right, left, forward, and back, gathering insights and gaining confidence. Then (only then) are we equipped to agree or disagree.
Larry Page, the former CEO of Google and Alphabet and who is known for his approach to bias for action and speedy decisions, championed this approach by asking, “Why can’t this be done sooner?” With that simple question, he urged people to search for decisions they can make today rather than trying to make a significant decision tomorrow. He encouraged people to avoid getting stuck in analysis and to move in a direction that approaches the truth—experimenting and learning along the way.
We must acknowledge that sometimes, we lack the energy or bandwidth to pursue any direction. It’s easier to float with others’ decisions because we’re too tired or don’t care about the consequences. In these situations, I’m a big fan of consent-based decision-making. I hold my judgment—neither agreeing nor disagreeing—and let others drive. I trust their judgment will be “good enough,” and we’ll all bear the consequences.
Still, it’s crucial to be transparent. Explicitly telling others, “I’m withholding my judgment and trusting you to decide,” prevents misunderstandings later. It ensures that no one assumes my silence equates to an agreement if I later express my disagreement.
The Freedom to Evolve
Withholding judgment today doesn’t mean we avoid decisions forever—it shifts the timeline. Critics, like many business gurus, argue that delaying any decision makes you fall behind. They think that postponing decisions allows competitors to move ahead. While we stagnate, they act. However, with this approach, we lose nothing—neither money nor time. On the contrary, we gain a lot.
By withholding judgment, we create space for learning, experimentation, and deeper understanding. It’s not about indecision but about finding the path to truth through exploration. In a world obsessed with speed and quick resolutions, we must reclaim the freedom to think, to pause, and ultimately to evolve.
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