Here's a leadership lesson to ponder from a used car lot, of all places: haste makes waste. It's an old saying, but it's true.

Years ago, I bought a Pontiac G6 off a used car lot. It looked good … it drove fine … the price felt right.

But I didn't slow down long enough to ask a single question past that. What I didn't know was that General Motors was about to discontinue the entire Pontiac brand.

The Purchase That Looked Fine on the Surface

GM announced in April 2009 that Pontiac would be phased out by the end of 2010, folding the brand entirely to focus on four core lines. I didn't know that when I signed the paperwork, because I never asked. The car looked good in the lot, and the monthly payment was "more affordable" than the F-150 I had flippantly purchased 6 months prior. That was the entire extent of my research.

Quite frankly, it felt like a "good deal" at the time. It certainly wasn't one. It just hadn't shown me the bill yet.

The Bill Came Due, One Broken Part at a Time

Over time, mechanical parts on vehicles wear down and break. That's not unique to Pontiac. What was unique was this: parts got harder to find, and every part that was still available got more expensive, because the supply chain behind an entire discontinued brand shrinks fast when nobody's making new ones.

Eventually the car developed a coolant system leak that couldn't be fixed, not because the leak itself was unusual, but because sourcing the right part for a phased-out brand had become its own project. I traded the car in after only owning it for about 2 years because the math had stopped making sense.

The Three-Minute Version of the Same Mistake

I think back to that rushed car purchase every time I see a leader make a hasty decision. The pattern is nearly identical.

A crisis hits and a decision need to me made "right now." The instinct is to move as fast as the pressure feels, because slowing down can feel like losing ground. So the decision gets made in the same moment the pressure is felt, not after the three minutes it would take to actually think it through.

What 3 Minutes Actually Buys You

Three minutes isn't long enough to gather a whole lot of new information. But it is long enough to ask one question: what am I not seeing right now because I'm rushing? That single question would have saved me from that car. It's saved me from worse decisions since.

The pause doesn't slow the crisis down. It slows your reaction to the crisis down, which is the only part of the equation you actually control. Everything else keeps moving at its own pace whether you pause or not.

Why This Feels Backwards in the Moment

Every instinct in a real crisis says speed is the whole game. Sometimes it is. But speed without a pause isn't necessarily speed. It's just the first available option, wearing speed's clothes.

The leaders who make good calls under pressure aren't the ones who never pause. They're the ones who've trained the pause down to almost nothing … three minutes, not three days … so it doesn't cost them the speed they actually need. That's the whole difference between haste and decisiveness. One skips the thinking entirely. The other compresses it.

What I'd Tell Myself on That Car Lot (if I had a "do over")

I wouldn't tell myself not to buy the car. Cars are supposed to be an emotional decision, at least a little. I'd tell myself to ask one question before signing anything: what don't I know yet that I should find out over the next three minutes, not the next three years?

That question costs almost nothing to ask. Not asking it cost me a car, with a coolant system that couldn't be fixed without paying an arm and a leg, and a supply chain problem nobody warned me about. Haste didn't make waste because I was careless. It made waste because I chose not to pause.

Marching Orders

The next time you feel a decision speeding up under pressure, take three minutes before you make any sudden moves. Ask what you're not seeing because you're rushing. If you want to get sharper on how you actually decide under pressure, take the free 3-minute leadership assessment. Your mission starts here.