A young tech founder recently asked me a question that stopped me, not because it was new, but because it was familiar: “What if I am making the wrong bets on the people I hire?” I smiled, because I have asked myself that same question more times than I can count especially in the early days of stepping into the healthtech industry and starting our Elixr Labs.

When you are building something from scratch, every decision feels like a risk- risk of time, money or energy. When it comes to the process of hiring, especially senior hiring, they can feel like placing the biggest bets of all because you are not just selecting a person. You are selecting a future by choosing culture and capability in one move. And if you are wrong in that, the consequences that come after are a lot. As founders, we carry a constant hum of uncertainty beneath our confidence. We are trained and sometimes conditioned to appear decisive, visionary and composed. But behind that external calm there are a loop of internal questions that never fully shuts off.

Perfection does not exist in people, not in hiring and not in founders. But instead of obsessing over avoiding mistakes, I talked about a method to him that has truly transformed my decision-making, a system that has saved me from my own blind spots more than any bestselling leadership book ever has and I call it the Decision Journal.

The Decision Journal

Whenever I make a major decision especially something as important as hiring a senior leader, I write down three things:

1. What I expect will happen.
2. Why I think it will happen.
3. The risks involved.

I treat this like a short and honest memo to my future self. It is not a performance review or a justification. It is about reasoning. Then months later, when the dust has settled, I return to it and that is when the real learning happens.

Even smart decisions lose their value if we do not understand why we made them. This is where The Decision Journal transformed everything for me.

The Humbling Power of Looking Back

Revisiting the Decision Journal is both uncomfortable and transformative. The questions I ask myself then are honest like did I miss something obvious? or did luck play a bigger role in this hiring process? Then, you realize where your reasoning was sharp and where it was wishful thinking. You see which predictions were grounded and which were guesses dressed as confidence.

Every time I go back and read it, a pattern is found that I am often wrong for the same reasons or often right for reasons I did not value enough at the time. It is humbling in the best way. The journal shows me:

• Where I overestimated myself- The moments when I thought I communicated or did things more clearly than I actually did.
• Where I underestimated my team- Sometimes they delivered results beyond what I expected.
• Where bias crept in. The time when I created false narratives about people because I wanted something to be true.

This practice of keeping a Decision Journal has reshaped my leadership far more effectively than any workshop or book ever could. Instead of relying on one’s memory, which is mostly selective, you are relying on evidence through the journal.

It also helps in one’s leadership shape into something new from not always being right to always learning faster. Most founders secretly fear being wrong. It feels like weakness and incompetence.

Great founders are not the ones who avoid mistakes, they are the ones who learn from them faster than everyone else. The Decision Journal trains you to become that kind of founder. The biggest shift I have experienced is I stopped trying to be the founder who is always right. I became the founder who is always learning and that mindset does not just make you better, it makes your team stronger. People want to follow leaders who evolve and not leaders who insist that they are perfect.

You will be wrong in many steps you take. But the key is to be wrong in the right direction.

Why I Want to Share More Conversations Like This

The conversation with the young founder reminded me why I started my podcast. The founder world does not need more perfect stories. We do not need more filtered narratives, overnight-success myths or leadership clichés. Founders, especially ones who have startups, need not just advice but honesty in it. They need to hear the messy truths, the uncomfortable parts like the real fears, doubts, errors and lessons that shape us. And so, we need founders talking to founders not pretending, just sharing the ideas, systems and experiences that help us grow. The Decision Journal is only one example, a powerful one. If it can help even one more founder make better, clearer and more grounded decisions, then it is worth talking about. These are the conversations I want to continue having on my podcast called Techzila, that help founders not just to build companies but build themselves.