8 ms·

Overthinking

195 points by danielsokil 5y ago

chaos_emergent 5y ago
I remember a period of time before I could confidently call myself a productive programmer in which I’d spend 90% of my time trying to understand best practices instead of building shit. It came from a place of wanting to “get it right” as education had incentivized rather than “being valuable” as capitalism rewards. I got out of that frame by working with and watching other doers. I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form, not when we symbolically learn about the form
- legrande 5y ago
  > I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form It's worth being 'in the trenches' just watching, not having to do much, just observing how the nitty gritty tasks are done. Just like an internship: you mostly watch, not commit to complex tasks. Unless you are an intern & want to risk it and accidentally mess up the company's code. There are so many companies wrecked by interns' bad decisions, but luckily most of them bounce back from that with grace.
mikub 5y ago
Thank you, I really liked that post. I'am 40years now and started to teach myself programming 4 years ago. I do a lot of overthinking, like "Linux or Windows", "Should I learn some C before Python? What about all this networking stuff, how does that work?". I know it probably doesn't really matter, because I consider myself still a beginner in programming, but it is sometimes really hard not to feel overwhelmed by all of this stuff, and just stop thinking about what, or what not to use.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  That sounds more like choice stress than overthinking. I'd say the latter is rather where you consider something from a million angles (overly many; overthinking) whereas the former is just having many questions to make a decision on because you don't yet have an established language to work with and are simply new to this and so it's overwhelming.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  I have been doing this for about 28 years now. It is always overwhelming. There is always one bigger tech rabbit hole to run down. My advice, start with 1 small thing you can do. Do not worry if it is right or wrong. Just pick something you can do. Then go from there. Just today I wrote some code I had been putting off because I was overthinking it. I had the code written up in about an hour. I was way overthinking it. I figured just splat something up and go from there. I found I had already worked most of it out. It is one thing I got out of agile work. Sometimes people just do not know what they want. But they will know what they do not want. That can be a starting place for you to help figure out what they do want. Also many times something is way better than nothing. Also if you are struggling with python vs C. Start with python. It is easy to splat something up and get something running and see results quickly. C used to be that thing. But it has a bit of a learning curve of 'how to compile a program' first, then learn to program with it. A good skill to have but when starting I would put it lower on the 'things to learn' scale. That little program I did earlier I could have done in java/C/C++/C#/js/bash/powershell/winbatch/SQL/etc/etc/etc but I picked python as it got me to splat something and get it done. It aint pretty but it gets me the info I was after. 100% throwaway code. My only real nitpick with python is that its ruthless dogmatic approach to spacing. Some consider that a good thing. But at first when you are learning it can be a drawback as you do not understand grouping and scope yet.
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  It certainly does matter, but it might not be the angle you want to approach the problem from. If you set a goal and/or find a mentor, the choices suddenly become easier, and the chance to get yourself lost in ideology -- slimmer.
samuell 5y ago
I think this advice assumes a lot about the reader. I find that quite a fraction of people rather think too little, often sold on some distorted misconception of "agile". I guess there is an art of thinking through things at a reasonable amount, knowing when to move forward, and when to stop again and think more. Sure, learning this art surely has to be done to a large part by experience, so the points in the article has their merits, but things, people and circumstances are not always the same.
gnulinux 5y ago
I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. I can't imagine trying to limit my thinking just for the sake of not overthinking. I'm not necessarily concerned about this blog post, but I'm curious if our frequent warns against overthinking can be a net loss?
- WA 5y ago
  - You didn’t think this through - That was a stupid idea - Do you even have a plan? - Do you know what you’re doing? - Darwin awards - … I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.
  - WJW 5y ago
    I was going to post basically this. There are tons of people saying "you are underthinking this", but they almost never use those exact words. (BTW, to the point where my spellchecker flags "underthinking" as a word that does not exist)
- mdp2021 5y ago
  So this friend of mine receives a call from the Director about to evaluate his work, and is told "Clearly you are brilliant, but other colleagues are faster than you... For example, yesterday I asked about X, and see how A was fast in replying?" It was not easy to express that A gave a quick response with a largely false content. It is called rushing, it came from a culture of stopping well before decent quality, and it should not be a value.
  - nuclearnice1 5y ago
    This great story is only half told! Is the director the hero, who gave clear feedback to her employees then listened to the response and corrected the course? Or is the director a lizard who demanded the impossible received junk in reply and didn’t recognize it even when courageously told?
zoomablemind 5y ago
I find that overthinking is a byproduct of overly complex expectations. These expectations are often externally imposed either by industry or by our own experiences. This dissonance is exacerbated by tools which require as much complex skills or lack the expected complexity in their output. "Hello world" town reminds a hopelessly overpopulated slums detached from glitzy shine of a megapolis that one can experience but not truly become one.
t0mbstone 5y ago
I overthink things and end up in analysis paralysis, not for any of the reasons listed, but because I don't want to have to untangle an incorrect mess later on.
- majormajor 5y ago
  That feels a lot like the "marketing" one. I think the belief that if you just think enough, you won't have to untangle anything later, is almost always incorrect. I've worked on a lot of systems that were very thought through but also ended up very messy - in large part because circumstances and needs changed over the years in ways that would be near-impossible to plan for all of them. But people selling framework X want to sell you the idea that if you just pick the right tool (theirs), you won't have those problems! (This is somewhat circular, though: if you had said something like "I think about problems a lot because I want to avoid untangling incorrect messes" then that doesn't have to be overthinking. But once you hit analysis paralysis, building nothing for an extended period becomes itself an incorrect decision. There's a fine line between giving a problem due consideration and not being able to stop thinking about it.)
  - tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
    Haha, exactly! You'll have to untangle a mess no matter what you choose. It's in the name -- SOFTware! Soft, because it can and will change.
afarrell 5y ago
One struggle I have is how to simultaneously embrace uncertainty and take responsibility for the impact of my actions. A high amount of uncertainty makes me feel like I’m a chef taking chicken thighs out of a warm fridge. I think there is a time to just say “no” — even if we fear that others will accuse us of overthinking.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  When it is truly important that I show up somewhere at a particular time, I factor in the long estimate of drive time and add 10 minutes. I am late <.00001 of the time. That is embracing uncertainty and taking responsibility.
roland35 5y ago
When I feel myself approaching overthinking, one strategy I try is to identify if there are different requirements or criteria I may have missed and write them down. A lot of decisions involve complicated trade-offs, and it is often too easy to punch holes in ideas, move on to the next idea, punch holes in that one, and end up back where you started! By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least try to optimize for the most important requirement, and be able to see that other ideas may be better for other requirements but not the most important one!
- aminicam 5y ago
  brilliant
- d3nj4l 5y ago
  I may be misunderstanding you, but what you’re describing sounds like the classic idea of decision matrices.
123pie123 5y ago
I get called out by others for overthinking - until the risks I've pointed out become reality It's all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a 'cowboy' and just winging it
- andrewksl 5y ago
  I guess the difference between an overthinker and having foresight is the rate of false positives?
  - xyzelement 5y ago
    That's a great way to put it. There right balance of action and caution is the thing that enables you to move forward quickly without blowing up. It also "takes all kinds" on a team since different people have a knack for one or the other. The problem happens because most people fall in love with their preference and are blind to its downsides. A quick tell is - whenever someone's justification for something blowing up is "oh but I have a bias for action" -- they are basically oblivious to their recklessness and underthinking. Whenever someone says "oh but I am much more cautious and thoughtful than these cowboys" they are oblivious to how little they do (vs could be doing) because they are paralyzed by overthinking. The person I like to work with is the one who says "man, I have a bias for over/under thinking but I try to catch myself in situations where it's not appropriate"
- phnofive 5y ago
  I am an overthinker, and I know that ideas are cheap; they're driven as much by emotion as thought, and if my observations are not received in the intended spirit, it's not necessarily worth it to keep pushing. What has consistently helped in winning trust when providing feedback is pairing any concern with either a qualification (blocker/aesthetic/security), a solution, or both. Then, you not only expose the thought process behind your perspective that they've missed something - with which your audience may not agree, but can judge in earnestness - but also your intention to help and support their vision.
WJW 5y ago
If I can recommend anything in this area, it would be the book "Art of action" by Stephen Bungay. It examines in quite a lot of detail how the military has "solved" the problem of having to make decisions without perfect information, and how you can improve the structure of your decision-making process when you find you are getting bogged down in process and bureaucracy.
- dr_hooo 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing a TLDR?
CountDrewku 5y ago
There comes a point where you're only thinking and not doing. If your thinking is paralyzing you into taking no action that's "overthinking". Just do something even if it's wrong sometimes.
- shocks 5y ago
  I think many of the commenters here are confusing overthinking projects (what the article is about[1]) and risks (not what the article is about). Is it sensible to think long and hard about the behaviour of a strategy which trades real money in real markets? Yes. Is it sensible to spend a week (or any time at all really) deciding if you should use an alpine base image in your docker container or something else? No. 1: "The result? Projects never materialize or are months behind schedule, and everybody is frustrated."
bumbada 5y ago
The problem is not overthinking but losing contact with reality. Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important. You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things. Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole. But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called "authority". If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program. The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors. Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again. Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that. Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth. An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission. If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.
gjvc 5y ago
"You're doing it all wrong." said someone doing nothing at all.
mtc010170 5y ago
We're all guilty of overthinking sometimes and under-thinking others. Of course, context is everything.. so perhaps the blanket statement is a useful reminder for the author.. but also maybe dangerous advice for those reading who this just gives license to continue not putting enough thought into things they should. A bias towards action might be a good default, but how many of us are dealing with untenable situations stemming from rushed decisions? So be careful with this advice.. and do your best to know yourself and the situation.
coding123 5y ago
Ugh, this is a very complicated struggle for me, personally. However I have been in the Health sector for the past 15 years. I had a short stint at a retailer. I think Finance, Health and Social Media we can't really "under"think too much because at a certain point you have potential death in the health sector for making a mistake. You have the potential for a billion dollar lawsuit in the financial sector, and a major class action privacy lawsuit in the social media sector... So while I tend to think, yeah this sounds great, at the same time we have to be very careful about what Jr level person that wants to start underthinking about stuff... I think a good balance is to have old geezers overthink and young ones underthink and come to some middle.
AlbertCory 5y ago
This is a rational analysis of a non-rational problem. "Risk aversion" is the closest term I can find in common use. "Oh, this might be wrong!" or "Oh, someone might criticize me!" become risks you're unwilling to run. "If I give a talk about my idea, people might make fun of it!" Everyone goes through this. Instead of thinking about it even more, Kerkour needs to work on his emotions. There's no shame in it. We're all afraid.
sonigogo 5y ago
I often wonder where I would be in life now if I hadn't "overthought" so many decisions in my 42 years of life. I feel like I often got stuck at different points, and am even feeling that way now, because of "overthinking." That being said, I have a lot to be grateful for and have been able to "summit so many mountains" that were unattainable by my immigrant (and sacrificial) parents and their families. Perhaps I often get "paralysis by analysis" because as pointed out in the post, I tend to overanalyze each potential outcome of a business idea instead of just testing things out and moving forward. Thankfully, I did take some steps to co-found two previous companies, one of which got off the ground so I don't always stay "stuck." Currently, I'm thinking about how to channel society's consumption habits for good.
curation 5y ago
These deadlocks of thought have a resource that is differended (not available to the discussion we are having for ideological reasons) but I will attempt a provocation: Philosophy. Precisely Graham Harmon's Immaterialsm and the analysis of form and the process of Duomining: This preoccupation with objects and forms cuts against the grain of most recent avant-garde theorizing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Usually objects are either dissolved downward into material components and sub-individual, blob-like masses (“undermining”), or they are dissolved upward into holistic networks of relations, events, and practices (“overmining”), or both of these at once (“duomining”). Form, for its part, has been so marginalized by the repeated waves of materialist theories that it is usually mentioned only in the context of mathematical formalization (for recent examples see Badiou 2006; Meillassoux 2008), precisely the opposite of what object-oriented philosophy means by form: a surplus beyond any access, mathematical or otherwise.(https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171.ch2 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171... )
jyriand 5y ago
Overthinking is when the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. You can see it happening every day in the meeting rooms while planning new features/releases, we don't really get any new information but it's comforting to just talk about it.
Kosirich 5y ago
"Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind. Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines" I'm not a Tool fanboy, I really ain't, but I use this as kind of "a mantra" when I catch myself overthinking it.
- nivertech 5y ago
  "[Ego] super-cogito ergo sum" "I overthink, therefore I am" "Dubito, ergo super-cogito, ergo sum" "I doubt, therefore I overthink, therefore I am" paraphrasing René Descartes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
  - Kosirich 5y ago
    Interesting thought, will the ability to doubt himself forever be that of a human or at some point we will see an emergence of an AI with an imposter syndrome.
    - dr_hooo 5y ago
      Isn't "overthinking" the way AI works even today, in a sense? I.e. this is a good solution, but there may be a better one, I should look for it.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
>we end up with whole countries filled with people who think, think, think but never start doing anything. The result is a lot of debates, whether it be online or on the TV, and stupid & complex rules and bureaucracies coming from people in need to justify all the time they are paid to think, think, think. Sounds exactly like Canada. The country with the highest post secondary education rates, so much good it does us.
gherkinnn 5y ago
What about pure fun? No ego. No marketing. I don't even the Education section is part of it. The simple amusement one gets of solving a puzzle. And if the actual problem is boring and repetitive, why not spice it up? Certainly a Poison, but none mentioned by OP.

195 points by danielsokil 5y ago

I remember a period of time before I could confidently call myself a productive programmer in which I’d spend 90% of my time trying to understand best practices instead of building shit. It came from a place of wanting to “get it right” as education had incentivized rather than “being valuable” as capitalism rewards. I got out of that frame by working with and watching other doers. I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form, not when we symbolically learn about the form

legrande 5y ago
> I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form It's worth being 'in the trenches' just watching, not having to do much, just observing how the nitty gritty tasks are done. Just like an internship: you mostly watch, not commit to complex tasks. Unless you are an intern & want to risk it and accidentally mess up the company's code. There are so many companies wrecked by interns' bad decisions, but luckily most of them bounce back from that with grace.

mikub 5y ago

Thank you, I really liked that post. I'am 40years now and started to teach myself programming 4 years ago. I do a lot of overthinking, like "Linux or Windows", "Should I learn some C before Python? What about all this networking stuff, how does that work?". I know it probably doesn't really matter, because I consider myself still a beginner in programming, but it is sometimes really hard not to feel overwhelmed by all of this stuff, and just stop thinking about what, or what not to use.

lucb1e 5y ago
That sounds more like choice stress than overthinking. I'd say the latter is rather where you consider something from a million angles (overly many; overthinking) whereas the former is just having many questions to make a decision on because you don't yet have an established language to work with and are simply new to this and so it's overwhelming.
sumtechguy 5y ago
I have been doing this for about 28 years now. It is always overwhelming. There is always one bigger tech rabbit hole to run down. My advice, start with 1 small thing you can do. Do not worry if it is right or wrong. Just pick something you can do. Then go from there. Just today I wrote some code I had been putting off because I was overthinking it. I had the code written up in about an hour. I was way overthinking it. I figured just splat something up and go from there. I found I had already worked most of it out. It is one thing I got out of agile work. Sometimes people just do not know what they want. But they will know what they do not want. That can be a starting place for you to help figure out what they do want. Also many times something is way better than nothing. Also if you are struggling with python vs C. Start with python. It is easy to splat something up and get something running and see results quickly. C used to be that thing. But it has a bit of a learning curve of 'how to compile a program' first, then learn to program with it. A good skill to have but when starting I would put it lower on the 'things to learn' scale. That little program I did earlier I could have done in java/C/C++/C#/js/bash/powershell/winbatch/SQL/etc/etc/etc but I picked python as it got me to splat something and get it done. It aint pretty but it gets me the info I was after. 100% throwaway code. My only real nitpick with python is that its ruthless dogmatic approach to spacing. Some consider that a good thing. But at first when you are learning it can be a drawback as you do not understand grouping and scope yet.
tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
It certainly does matter, but it might not be the angle you want to approach the problem from. If you set a goal and/or find a mentor, the choices suddenly become easier, and the chance to get yourself lost in ideology -- slimmer.

samuell 5y ago

I think this advice assumes a lot about the reader. I find that quite a fraction of people rather think too little, often sold on some distorted misconception of "agile". I guess there is an art of thinking through things at a reasonable amount, knowing when to move forward, and when to stop again and think more. Sure, learning this art surely has to be done to a large part by experience, so the points in the article has their merits, but things, people and circumstances are not always the same.

gnulinux 5y ago

I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks. But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink. I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. I can't imagine trying to limit my thinking just for the sake of not overthinking. I'm not necessarily concerned about this blog post, but I'm curious if our frequent warns against overthinking can be a net loss?

WA 5y ago
- You didn’t think this through - That was a stupid idea - Do you even have a plan? - Do you know what you’re doing? - Darwin awards - … I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.
- WJW 5y ago
  I was going to post basically this. There are tons of people saying "you are underthinking this", but they almost never use those exact words. (BTW, to the point where my spellchecker flags "underthinking" as a word that does not exist)
mdp2021 5y ago
So this friend of mine receives a call from the Director about to evaluate his work, and is told "Clearly you are brilliant, but other colleagues are faster than you... For example, yesterday I asked about X, and see how A was fast in replying?" It was not easy to express that A gave a quick response with a largely false content. It is called rushing, it came from a culture of stopping well before decent quality, and it should not be a value.
- nuclearnice1 5y ago
  This great story is only half told! Is the director the hero, who gave clear feedback to her employees then listened to the response and corrected the course? Or is the director a lizard who demanded the impossible received junk in reply and didn’t recognize it even when courageously told?

zoomablemind 5y ago

I find that overthinking is a byproduct of overly complex expectations. These expectations are often externally imposed either by industry or by our own experiences. This dissonance is exacerbated by tools which require as much complex skills or lack the expected complexity in their output. "Hello world" town reminds a hopelessly overpopulated slums detached from glitzy shine of a megapolis that one can experience but not truly become one.

t0mbstone 5y ago

I overthink things and end up in analysis paralysis, not for any of the reasons listed, but because I don't want to have to untangle an incorrect mess later on.

majormajor 5y ago
That feels a lot like the "marketing" one. I think the belief that if you just think enough, you won't have to untangle anything later, is almost always incorrect. I've worked on a lot of systems that were very thought through but also ended up very messy - in large part because circumstances and needs changed over the years in ways that would be near-impossible to plan for all of them. But people selling framework X want to sell you the idea that if you just pick the right tool (theirs), you won't have those problems! (This is somewhat circular, though: if you had said something like "I think about problems a lot because I want to avoid untangling incorrect messes" then that doesn't have to be overthinking. But once you hit analysis paralysis, building nothing for an extended period becomes itself an incorrect decision. There's a fine line between giving a problem due consideration and not being able to stop thinking about it.)
- tdsamardzhiev 5y ago
  Haha, exactly! You'll have to untangle a mess no matter what you choose. It's in the name -- SOFTware! Soft, because it can and will change.

afarrell 5y ago

One struggle I have is how to simultaneously embrace uncertainty and take responsibility for the impact of my actions. A high amount of uncertainty makes me feel like I’m a chef taking chicken thighs out of a warm fridge. I think there is a time to just say “no” — even if we fear that others will accuse us of overthinking.

wintermutestwin 5y ago
When it is truly important that I show up somewhere at a particular time, I factor in the long estimate of drive time and add 10 minutes. I am late <.00001 of the time. That is embracing uncertainty and taking responsibility.

roland35 5y ago

When I feel myself approaching overthinking, one strategy I try is to identify if there are different requirements or criteria I may have missed and write them down. A lot of decisions involve complicated trade-offs, and it is often too easy to punch holes in ideas, move on to the next idea, punch holes in that one, and end up back where you started! By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least try to optimize for the most important requirement, and be able to see that other ideas may be better for other requirements but not the most important one!

aminicam 5y ago
brilliant
d3nj4l 5y ago
I may be misunderstanding you, but what you’re describing sounds like the classic idea of decision matrices.

123pie123 5y ago

I get called out by others for overthinking - until the risks I've pointed out become reality It's all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a 'cowboy' and just winging it

andrewksl 5y ago
I guess the difference between an overthinker and having foresight is the rate of false positives?
- xyzelement 5y ago
  That's a great way to put it. There right balance of action and caution is the thing that enables you to move forward quickly without blowing up. It also "takes all kinds" on a team since different people have a knack for one or the other. The problem happens because most people fall in love with their preference and are blind to its downsides. A quick tell is - whenever someone's justification for something blowing up is "oh but I have a bias for action" -- they are basically oblivious to their recklessness and underthinking. Whenever someone says "oh but I am much more cautious and thoughtful than these cowboys" they are oblivious to how little they do (vs could be doing) because they are paralyzed by overthinking. The person I like to work with is the one who says "man, I have a bias for over/under thinking but I try to catch myself in situations where it's not appropriate"
phnofive 5y ago
I am an overthinker, and I know that ideas are cheap; they're driven as much by emotion as thought, and if my observations are not received in the intended spirit, it's not necessarily worth it to keep pushing. What has consistently helped in winning trust when providing feedback is pairing any concern with either a qualification (blocker/aesthetic/security), a solution, or both. Then, you not only expose the thought process behind your perspective that they've missed something - with which your audience may not agree, but can judge in earnestness - but also your intention to help and support their vision.

WJW 5y ago

If I can recommend anything in this area, it would be the book "Art of action" by Stephen Bungay. It examines in quite a lot of detail how the military has "solved" the problem of having to make decisions without perfect information, and how you can improve the structure of your decision-making process when you find you are getting bogged down in process and bureaucracy.

dr_hooo 5y ago
Would you mind sharing a TLDR?

CountDrewku 5y ago

There comes a point where you're only thinking and not doing. If your thinking is paralyzing you into taking no action that's "overthinking". Just do something even if it's wrong sometimes.

shocks 5y ago
I think many of the commenters here are confusing overthinking projects (what the article is about[1]) and risks (not what the article is about). Is it sensible to think long and hard about the behaviour of a strategy which trades real money in real markets? Yes. Is it sensible to spend a week (or any time at all really) deciding if you should use an alpine base image in your docker container or something else? No. 1: "The result? Projects never materialize or are months behind schedule, and everybody is frustrated."

bumbada 5y ago

The problem is not overthinking but losing contact with reality. Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important. You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things. Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole. But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called "authority". If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program. The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors. Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again. Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that. Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth. An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission. If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.

gjvc 5y ago

"You're doing it all wrong." said someone doing nothing at all.

mtc010170 5y ago

We're all guilty of overthinking sometimes and under-thinking others. Of course, context is everything.. so perhaps the blanket statement is a useful reminder for the author.. but also maybe dangerous advice for those reading who this just gives license to continue not putting enough thought into things they should. A bias towards action might be a good default, but how many of us are dealing with untenable situations stemming from rushed decisions? So be careful with this advice.. and do your best to know yourself and the situation.

coding123 5y ago

Ugh, this is a very complicated struggle for me, personally. However I have been in the Health sector for the past 15 years. I had a short stint at a retailer. I think Finance, Health and Social Media we can't really "under"think too much because at a certain point you have potential death in the health sector for making a mistake. You have the potential for a billion dollar lawsuit in the financial sector, and a major class action privacy lawsuit in the social media sector... So while I tend to think, yeah this sounds great, at the same time we have to be very careful about what Jr level person that wants to start underthinking about stuff... I think a good balance is to have old geezers overthink and young ones underthink and come to some middle.

AlbertCory 5y ago

This is a rational analysis of a non-rational problem. "Risk aversion" is the closest term I can find in common use. "Oh, this might be wrong!" or "Oh, someone might criticize me!" become risks you're unwilling to run. "If I give a talk about my idea, people might make fun of it!" Everyone goes through this. Instead of thinking about it even more, Kerkour needs to work on his emotions. There's no shame in it. We're all afraid.

sonigogo 5y ago

I often wonder where I would be in life now if I hadn't "overthought" so many decisions in my 42 years of life. I feel like I often got stuck at different points, and am even feeling that way now, because of "overthinking." That being said, I have a lot to be grateful for and have been able to "summit so many mountains" that were unattainable by my immigrant (and sacrificial) parents and their families. Perhaps I often get "paralysis by analysis" because as pointed out in the post, I tend to overanalyze each potential outcome of a business idea instead of just testing things out and moving forward. Thankfully, I did take some steps to co-found two previous companies, one of which got off the ground so I don't always stay "stuck." Currently, I'm thinking about how to channel society's consumption habits for good.

curation 5y ago

These deadlocks of thought have a resource that is differended (not available to the discussion we are having for ideological reasons) but I will attempt a provocation: Philosophy. Precisely Graham Harmon's Immaterialsm and the analysis of form and the process of Duomining: This preoccupation with objects and forms cuts against the grain of most recent avant-garde theorizing in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Usually objects are either dissolved downward into material components and sub-individual, blob-like masses (“undermining”), or they are dissolved upward into holistic networks of relations, events, and practices (“overmining”), or both of these at once (“duomining”). Form, for its part, has been so marginalized by the repeated waves of materialist theories that it is usually mentioned only in the context of mathematical formalization (for recent examples see Badiou 2006; Meillassoux 2008), precisely the opposite of what object-oriented philosophy means by form: a surplus beyond any access, mathematical or otherwise.(https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171.ch2 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315641171... )

jyriand 5y ago

Overthinking is when the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in. You can see it happening every day in the meeting rooms while planning new features/releases, we don't really get any new information but it's comforting to just talk about it.

Kosirich 5y ago

"Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind. Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines" I'm not a Tool fanboy, I really ain't, but I use this as kind of "a mantra" when I catch myself overthinking it.

nivertech 5y ago
"[Ego] super-cogito ergo sum" "I overthink, therefore I am" "Dubito, ergo super-cogito, ergo sum" "I doubt, therefore I overthink, therefore I am" paraphrasing René Descartes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
- Kosirich 5y ago
  Interesting thought, will the ability to doubt himself forever be that of a human or at some point we will see an emergence of an AI with an imposter syndrome.
  - dr_hooo 5y ago
    Isn't "overthinking" the way AI works even today, in a sense? I.e. this is a good solution, but there may be a better one, I should look for it.

kspacewalk2 5y ago

>we end up with whole countries filled with people who think, think, think but never start doing anything. The result is a lot of debates, whether it be online or on the TV, and stupid & complex rules and bureaucracies coming from people in need to justify all the time they are paid to think, think, think. Sounds exactly like Canada. The country with the highest post secondary education rates, so much good it does us.

gherkinnn 5y ago

What about pure fun? No ego. No marketing. I don't even the Education section is part of it. The simple amusement one gets of solving a puzzle. And if the actual problem is boring and repetitive, why not spice it up? Certainly a Poison, but none mentioned by OP.