Every Decision Has a Cost. The Question Is: What's the Return?
Why some of the most important investments you'll ever make have nothing to do with money.
For most of my life, I didn't have the luxury of making decisions based solely on what I wanted.
As a young single mother, every decision carried consequences. Time mattered. Money mattered. Energy mattered. Mistakes were expensive.
There were two little boys depending on me, and every choice I made had the potential to affect their future as much as my own.
Looking back, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was learning one of the most important lessons of my life: Every decision has a cost. The question is whether the return is worth the investment.
Return on Investment Isn't Just Financial
When people hear the phrase "return on investment," they often think about money. I think about life.
The best decisions I have made were rarely the easiest. Many weren't even the safest. Some required time I didn't think I had. Some required sacrifices I wasn't sure I could afford. Some required me to leave behind things that felt comfortable.
The investment was often immediate. The return was often delayed.
That can make good decisions difficult to recognize in the moment.
The Best Decisions Rarely Feel Comfortable
When I earned my GED, I wasn't investing in a diploma. I was investing in possibility.
When I went back to college years later, I wasn't investing in letters behind my name. I was investing in opportunity.
When I pursued my bachelor's degree and later my master's degree, I wasn't chasing credentials. I was chasing growth.
For the first time in my life, I had discovered that I could learn, and I wanted to see where that realization could take me.
The return wasn't simply education. The return was confidence.
Every Yes Requires a No
One lesson I learned along the way is that every meaningful investment requires a tradeoff. Every yes requires a no.
Saying yes to education meant saying no to free time. Saying yes to growth meant saying no to comfort. Saying yes to opportunity sometimes meant saying no to certainty.
We often think of boundaries as something we use to keep people out. I learned to view them differently.
Boundaries are how we protect the investments that matter most:
- Our time.
- Our goals.
- Our energy.
- Our values.
- Our future.
Without boundaries, even the best opportunities can be crowded out by distractions.
Be Careful Who Gets a Seat at Your Table
One piece of advice I often share with young women is to pay attention to the people around them. The people in our lives influence how we see ourselves.
Some people encourage growth. Some people celebrate success. Some people challenge us to think bigger. Others don't.
One of the most valuable boundaries we can establish is deciding whose opinions deserve a seat at our table.
Throughout my life, I have been fortunate to have people who invested in me:
- A teacher who helped me understand dyslexia.
- A manager who opened doors and created opportunities.
- Mentors who shared their knowledge and challenged me to grow.
Those relationships changed the trajectory of my life. Not because they gave me success, but because they helped me recognize my own potential.
Sometimes the Return Doesn't Look Like You Expected
One of the biggest risks I ever took was leaving a career I loved to pursue a new opportunity. I sold my home, moved to another state, and started over.
Three months later, I was laid off.
If we were measuring the return on investment in the short term, that decision looked like a failure.
But life isn't always measured in quarters or years. Sometimes it takes much longer to understand the return.
That decision eventually led me to Utah. It expanded my perspective. It created opportunities I never would have found otherwise. It introduced me to the man who would become my husband.
What appeared to be a setback became one of the most important turning points of my life.
The Return You Can't Measure
Some of the most valuable returns in life don't fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
You can't always quantify confidence. You can't calculate resilience. You can't measure the value of discovering what you're capable of.
Yet those returns often have the greatest impact.
When I look back at the decisions that shaped my life, I don't see a perfectly planned career. I see a series of investments made by a mother trying to create a better future for her children.
The remarkable thing is that those investments ended up changing my life, too.
Because every decision has a cost. The question is: What's the return?
