It could hardly be easier for the Rev Ian Paisley, could it? The office of First Minister, and the attendant power, prestige and international acclaim await. All he has to do is change the habit of a political lifetime - and say Yes. This is not to denigrate the octogenarian DUP leader. It is to reflect rather on the extraordinary personal journey he must complete if he is to meet the deadline and form a partnership government with Sinn Féin at Stormont next Monday.
We know from his own account that the Free Presbyterian moderator will be praying hard as he conducts comprehensive negotiations in a schedule that might be punishing for a man twenty years his junior. He told the BBC recently that he has never lost his faith. Yet in the quiet watches of the night, Dr Paisley may well have felt his soul troubled. For others, as he hinted in Belfast the other day, have lost faith in him.
The church he built on a gospel of uncompromising Protestantism now resembles the house divided against itself. Old friends have turned away, some disbelieving still that the "Big Man" in whom they reposed their trust is about to do that for which he denounced all unionist leaders before him, and seek peace with "the enemy".
To see the changing world through their eyes is to realise that this is not easy for Dr Paisley. Yet he knows that the world - and "the enemy" - has changed, and that he has correctly divined the mood of his people. He may instinctively revile the language of the "peace process" of which republicans and nationalists claim ownership. He need hardly be expected now to laud the Hume/Adams dialogue, or the many initiatives that preceded it all the way back through people like Fr Alex Reid and Albert Reynolds to Charles Haughey.
Nor is Dr Paisley likely in a moment of humility to acknowledge the role played by David Trimble's Ulster Unionists in re-shaping and re-directing that process. What Reg Empey calls their "heavy lifting" secured constitutional change in the Republic and brought all parties to accept the principle of consent for any change to Northern Ireland's own constitutional position. Without it there would not be the foundation for the partnership government Dr Paisley can now jointly lead with Sinn Féin's Deputy First Minister-designate, Martin McGuinness.
That said, the DUP leader can legitimately claim to have changed the landscape in an already transformed Northern Ireland. The comprehensive IRA decommissioning, damagingly denied to Mr Trimble happened on Dr Paisley's watch. The reports of the Independent Monitoring Commission testify to the ongoing degradation of the IRA's capacity as a terrorist organisation. And, crucially, it was Dr Paisley who successfully argued that support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland should be a requirement of any party entering government. He knows that the decision by the Sinn Féin Ardfheis in January marked the final acceptance by republicans of a state they had previously fought to destroy.
Yes, change is required of him. But the circumstances in which he is asked to do so are altered beyond his wildest imaginings. There will never be a better moment - and it is his to seize now.