“Someday is not a day of the week.”

That pointed phrase, coined by the children’s book author Denise Brennan-Nelson, has been poached by motivational speakers, financial advisors and shoe salesman (looking at you, Phil Knight), to the point where it’s been blunted like a dum-dum bullet.

But the original source remains a modern classic.

In the book, three-year-old Max keeps begging Grandpa and Mom and Dad to take him to the fair, and they keep stalling. They never outright refuse, which is what’s so infuriating. (It’s like the old Woody Allen gag about the tribe that has no word in their language for No. “They just nod their head and say, ‘I’ll get back to you.’”) Max tries to pin them down. They weasel out of it in a passive-aggressive way that verges on a humanitarian crime. Yes, yes, great idea, you fella, we will do that … some day. Max hears: “Someday. Ya man! Got ‘er nailed down. But when is Someday? He can’t find it on the calendar. What the heck?

The phrase still captures the spirit of this project as I originally conceived it. Unlike Max’s, the interference we’re encountering isn’t being perpetrated on us. The call’s coming from inside the house. We ourselves are coming up with excuses. At some level One Big Day remains a plea for just … doing the thing. No more hedging and overresearching and procrastinating. Make it happen, buster. Commit to it now – whatever it is.

Have you noticed that people seem to be having a harder and harder time with this? Hatching even simple plans and following through? What’s going on?

We all know about the paradox of choice – when there’s 10 brands of mustard customers end up leaving empty-handed. Life used to be so easy! Three channels, two flavours, any colour of car as long as it’s black. Now, in the consumerist carnival, we’re so paralytically FOMO’d we make Hamlet look strong-willed.

I think this problem goes deeper. Folks have lost confidence to try things that might not work out. Because think of the consequences!

I reckon it’s time to redraw the cost-benefit analysis here. Not only are most decisions way less high-stakes than we think, we vastly underappreciate the benefits of taking action.

A ten-year study of more than 17,000 c-suite executives, published in the Harvard Business Review, suggests the single biggest secret to their success is “their ability to decide with speed and conviction,” notes Dorie Clark, a Columbia Business School professor who’s strong in this niche.

More broadly – and this one might floor you – decisiveness has even been linked to living a longer life.

When I was in the thick of my research on very old, very healthy people, I came across a study of residents of a town in southern Italy. The town’s called Cilento, and it has a Blue-Zone-ish claim to fame: one in ten residents is over 100 years old. (By comparison, in the general North American population the ratio is about one in 5,000.) The study explored possible contributing factors. The centenarians had all the things going for them that you’d expect, from rigorous work/exercise habits to strong social ties. But there was another suite of factors that shone through: positive thought patterns. Chief among them was confident decision-making. These folks just weren’t plagued by doubt. At every choice point they acted swiftly and decisively. No dicking around. Make a call, own it, live with it.

“Think of decision-making as doing experiments,” advises “decision coach” Nell Wulfhart– who despite the sketchy-sounding vibe of her title is actually full of great advice. Manage the scope of the thing. Test the paint somewhere unobtrusive before going whole-hog. If your experiment fails, no biggee. If it succeeds, scale up. Either way you’ve learned something. Win win! “The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial-and-error and the workings of time, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning,” the writer and statistician Nissan Taleb said recently. “This is something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.”

So there it is. You can’t really advance the plot from the beach. Gotta wade into the surf. Gotta get wet.

Proceed boldly. Don’t look back.

“The decision-making business is the regret-minimization business,” said Wulfhart. “You can minimize regret by making sure your decisions are aligned with your values, making sure your decisions connect you to your desired future … but also understand that some regret is going to be inevitable even though you feel like you made the right choice.

“Remember, you made the best decision at the time with the info you had at the time; the outcome of that decision if not fully under your control – it never was. So don’t beat yourself up.”

Either do or do not: there is no try.

There is no Someday.

Sorry about that, Max.