Are You Still Making Pros and Cons Lists for Your Career Change?
You've drawn the line down the middle of the page. Left column, right column. You've been thorough about it — listing everything you can think of for each option, trying to capture every angle. Maybe you've done this on paper, maybe in a spreadsheet, maybe in the notes app on your phone at two in the morning. You've stared at the finished list and waited for it to tell you something. It didn't. So you added more rows, thinking perhaps you'd missed a variable that would tip the balance. You hadn't missed anything. The list just sat there, perfectly balanced, perfectly useless.
If you've done this more than once, you've probably noticed a pattern. The list gets longer each time but the answer never gets closer.
Why this is everyone's first suggestion
The pros and cons list has a reputation it hasn't earned. It's the first thing people suggest when you mention you're weighing a decision, and for good reason — for most decisions, it works. Which flat to rent. Whether to accept a job offer with a clear alternative. Which city to move to when you already know what matters to you. In these situations, the variables sit on roughly the same plane. You can compare rent against commute time, square footage against neighbourhood, and arrive at something resembling a sensible answer.
It feels rigorous. It feels like you're being responsible and structured about something important. And it borrows credibility from Benjamin Franklin, who described the method in a 1772 letter to the scientist Joseph Priestley. Priestley was agonising over a career decision of his own and wrote to Franklin for advice. Franklin's reply outlined the two-column approach and called it "Moral or Prudential Algebra." People still cite this with the same reverence they'd use for a peer-reviewed study. The method has over two centuries of social proof behind it.
Where it breaks apart
A career change is not a flat rental.
The variables involved in a career decision don't sit on the same plane. "Financial security" and "creative fulfilment" aren't two weights you can place on a scale and see which one is heavier. "Proximity to family" and "intellectual challenge" aren't in the same category. "Earning potential over ten years" and "how you'd feel on a Wednesday morning" aren't even the same kind of thing.
But the pros and cons list treats them as if they are. It puts them in the same two columns, gives them each one row, and asks you to look at the total and decide. You end up comparing things that can't be compared, using a format that implies they can be. The list doesn't just fail to resolve the decision. It structurally misrepresents it.
And it gets worse the more options you're considering. If you're weighing two career directions, you might have two lists. Three directions, three lists. Five directions, five lists — each one full of variables that refuse to collapse into a clear winner because they were never the same kind of variable in the first place. You're not building toward a decision. You're building an increasingly detailed inventory of trade-offs, and an inventory is not a verdict.
What happens when the list doesn't work
Here's where it does real damage.
The pros and cons list carries an implicit promise: if you think carefully enough, write it all down, and look at the columns honestly, the answer will emerge. When it doesn't — when you've filled in every row and still can't choose — the most natural conclusion is that you've done something wrong. You didn't think hard enough. You're missing some crucial piece of self-knowledge. You're not being honest with yourself about what you really want.
None of that is true. The list was never capable of producing the answer you're looking for, because the answer isn't a calculation. You haven't failed at the method. The method doesn't work for this kind of decision. But that's not the conclusion most people reach. Most people make another list. A more detailed one, this time. With weighted scores, perhaps, or colour coding. The sophistication goes up. The result stays the same.
If you've been through this cycle and ended up feeling like the problem is your own indecisiveness, that feeling makes sense. But it comes from trusting a tool that was designed for a fundamentally different kind of problem.
What the list is actually good at
This isn't to say the exercise was wasted. The list is excellent at one thing: showing you what's in play. It surfaces the variables, the competing priorities, the trade-offs you're navigating. That part is genuinely useful. Every row you wrote down is a real thing that matters to you, and knowing what matters is not nothing.
What the list can't do is resolve the conflicts between those things. It can show you that financial security and creative freedom are both important to you. It cannot tell you which one to prioritise, because that's not a problem you can solve by adding more rows to a spreadsheet. It's a problem that requires a different mechanism entirely — not a better way to compare, but a way to eliminate.
The difference matters. Comparison asks "which of these is best?" Elimination asks "which of these can I remove?" One question leads to more deliberation. The other leads to fewer options. And fewer options, it turns out, is the only thing that has ever actually made a career decision feel manageable.
That shift, from comparing to eliminating, is what Before You Leap is built around. A different process. Have a look if you're tired of staring at columns.
The list was never going to tell you what to choose. It was only ever going to show you what you're weighing.
