Airport theory says the plane leaves whether you're ready or not. The mathematics says something worse.
Options arrive one at a time. Each one you pass is gone forever, and you can only move forward. So when do you commit?
The 37% rule gives the optimal answer. Look, but choose nothing, through the first 37% of the options. Then take the first one better than everything you've seen. That maximises your odds — and even played perfectly, you'll be wrong most of the time.
Two things fall out of it. You must let good options go early, purely to learn the scale of what's on offer. And full information and a live option never exist at the same moment: by the time you're certain, there is nothing left to decide.
Careers, houses, people. You choose on incomplete information because the alternative is choosing nothing, which the maths counts as a loss too.
Certainty always arrives after the gate closes.