Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about decision-making. Make good decisions, take small but persistent steps in the right direction, and you can achieve amazing things. Make poor decisions, and your mountains seem to grow taller and more insurmountable each day.

Since the start of the year, I’ve been making poor decisions. Actually it’s more accurate to say I’ve been postponing decisions. But making no decision is really making a decision to do nothing—and that’s usually a poor choice. So my mountains have begun to seem … immovable.

Fortunately, those mountains are uniquely mine, and the only person my idleness has hurt is me. Now that I’ve chosen to do something, I can simply move forward with no real harm done.

But what if other lives were in the balance? What if your failure to act could cause irreparable harm?

That was the question Ben Sliney had to face the first morning on his new job as national operations manager at the FAA Command Center in Herndon, Virginia. Sliney was assuming primary responsibility for monitoring the nation’s air traffic.

The date: September 11, 2001.

Disaster

“We have some planes.” That’s the fragment of conversation air traffic controllers picked up when they tried to contact an American Airlines flight that appeared to have been hijacked.

Some. More than one.

At that moment, Sliney’s controllers were monitoring 3,786 flights.

Fifteen minutes later, a plane crashed into the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. Before air traffic control—or anyone else—had time to process what was happening, a second plane slammed into the south tower.

Sliney’s worst fears were confirmed. Hijackers had taken at least two planes. But how many more? According to a minute-by-minute account published by USA Today in 2006, air traffic control officials in New York and Boston—where the two planes originated—immediately halted takeoffs and landings. Although that was a serious step, for Sliney it wasn’t enough.

Decisions

Since nothing like this had ever occurred, no protocol existed. Although specialists counseled various responses, the decision of what to do next fell to him. He could have postponed … waited to see what would happen next … waited for instructions from the head of the FAA in Washington, the military, or the White House … waited and hoped the crisis was over. Instead, he made the bold decision to halt all takeoffs nationwide.

Less than 15 minutes later, another plane dove into the Pentagon. And that’s when Sliney made another decision that could have ended his career before it began. He took the unprecedented step of ordering all planes in American airspace—more than 3,700 aircraft—to land immediately.

One last plane—United 93, which already had been hijacked—was lost that day. But because of Ben Sliney’s willingness to step up in the worst possible circumstances and make the most difficult decisions, no one will know how many lives were saved.