Don’t Overthink This

Make the decision!

Well, hey there. Welcome back.

I’ve been thinking a lot about, well, overthinking.

As someone who’s a self-professed overthinker, I also notice that I’m typically not accused of it by others.

Do you think you overthink? Do you overthink a lot? Is it just sometimes? Is it only in your personal life, but you don’t do it at work?

And what’s the difference between analyzing something and overthinking it? Let’s let’s talk about that.

Analyzing vs. Overthinking: Understanding the Difference

When someone is accused of overthinking, what does that mean?

It typically means the person thinks the other person is committing too much brainpower to something. On the on the most basic level, you’re thinking too much about that.

Make the decision! Or you’re taking too long to make the decision, right?

If a surgeon goes home and practices his knots for 10 hours, is he overthinking the knots?

If the surgeon is in surgery, and he just freezes with the scalpel for 10 minutes, is he overthinking what to do next?

Do you see the difference between those two actions?

If you’re trying to teach someone how to sword fight, you go through the movements very slowly. You tell them, “If this happens, move it this way. You can parry this way. This is going to take too long to move your sword here. You should always have this stance.”

It’s a long, arduous, methodical process, just like anything that we get good at.

Microsecond Decisions and the Muscle Memory of Experts

In my book Three Voices, I talk about how our first voice is our intuition, our knee-jerk reaction, and our own muscle memory.

If you’re really good at something, like, let’s say, tying knots for surgery, or the perfect golf swing, or sword fighting, the amount of decisions you make in a matter of microseconds is astounding, especially when compared to someone who doesn’t know the skill.

And that’s why, as I said in the book, it’s sometimes difficult to explain a skill to someone because you’re used to doing it in literally half a second, but it takes you using your third voice—the thing I’m using to talk to you, hello!—that can take literally hundreds of times or even thousands of times longer to explain and say, “Now you do this, and no, if this happens, do this.” Oh!

I mean, that’s literally a microsecond when you’re actually performing the skill. If you try to talk a race car driver through racing, he’d barely make it around the track once.

If you have embraced and taken to heart your job or your skill, which I assume you did, you can do things in a very short amount of time that others take a while to do. And you pay no attention to it because you say, “Well, that’s the level I’m at. I’m I’m a professional.”

Charging for Expertise instead of Hours

And one of the pitfalls of people who are solopreneurs, or people who are in the service industry, is that they charge based on time.

If you spend 15-plus years honing a skill and becoming so good at it that you are not only as good as, if not better than your competition, and then you charge based on time, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

If it takes you a half hour to do something that it takes them three hours to do, and they charge a certain price, you should be charging that price as well. And in the cases where the lessened time is important, you should be charging a higher price. And this is the trap a lot of people fall into.

But what does this have to do with overthinking?

Well, getting back to the description of it, overthinking is thinking too much about something. So I’m showing you how when you’re learning a skill, you are thinking too much about it, because you’re doing it at a speed that you can monitor.

Now, add to that the fact that sometimes, some things require a good amount of thinking.

I can tell you, I have had past experiences in solving problems in which I paused for literally two seconds only to have the client think I didn’t know what I was doing.

I mean, that only happened once with the client until they learned just how much I I knew, but the first time they see it, they think, “Oh…”

like they expect you to instantly come up with a solution on something that you literally were just shown.

And there are a lot of times you can do that, right? I mean, that happens in parenting, with problem solving, with with with your job, and so forth. But sometimes you have to think, “Mm, I have to think this through a little bit. This is interesting.”

And again, that’s different than freezing up and pausing because you are thinking about too many permutations of what this could be.

Does this sound confusing and overwhelming? Well, yes, it it is. Well, maybe you’re overthinking it.

The Social Stigma of Deep Thinking and Labeling

Okay, silliness aside, overthinking is a very subjective thing when it comes from the outside. And as we’ve said before, I think in my episode on labels, we talked about how if someone labels you, they’re exerting some control over who you are.

Let let that sink in a little bit.

Søren Kierkegaard said, “If you label me, you negate me.”

Others have said, including myself, “If you label me, you diminish me.”

What I’m saying here is if you are labeled, you are defined. You’re letting others define you.

So in that moment where I was giving a tremendous amount of brainpower to something that the client didn’t have a clue about, they labeled me as being confused or not understanding something, when in fact I was actually committing a good deal of brainpower to figuring out something very quickly.

Don’t get me wrong, overthinking is a real thing. Overthinking can take the form of simply not understanding your time constraints. It can take the form of a lack of confidence. If you don’t have a lack of confidence, you may have come up with the solution, but you don’t act on it. Well, that’s different than thinking, that’s simply not being able to act on something.

But if I’m allowed to get up on my soapbox—there we go—I will tell you that we live in a society that does not reward deep thinking.

You can prove this if you go to a group of diverse individuals, let’s say a networking group, and you announce that you have been thinking a lot about X, Y, or Z, and you’ve been studying it, and you’ve been researching it, and if it’s something that’s not necessarily part of what you do for a living, you’ll get a laugh.

You’ll get more than one uncomfortable laugh because people won’t know what to say.

It’s absurd for someone who is not in a learning state like high school, college, or whatever, to actually just commit a good deal of thought to learning something outside their sphere of influence. You you just don’t hear about this and people don’t talk about it. And they’re uncomfortable.

This place of discomfort is where the accusation of overthinking comes from from people who are labeling it incorrectly.

“Tunga spend too much time study plant. Tunga stay in cave where fire warm.”

So what I’m saying is if you take a—I hate to say deep dive because it’s so overused by AI—if you take a good amount of effort to thoroughly research something analytically, it can look like overthinking. But again, the label of overthinking will be awarded to you based on the time constraints of the viewer.

If they’re teaching you a golf swing and you just sit there, you’re overthinking.

If they say, “What do you want for dinner?” and you take forever to decide, then you’re overthinking.

Why Society Should Reclaim and Reward the Thoughtful Pause

But what if you’re training yourself, your first voice, to make that swing properly, to have proper follow-through and all that stuff?

What if you’re just trying to get it right the first time?

What if that also applies to what you want to eat because you’ve found you tend to go for the most expensive thing, or you go for the easiest thing, and you’re trying to change your diet? Well, that can cause the pause.

What if you’re trying to come up with a really clever solution for your client who’s coming to you for something they think is mundane? “Well, just give me the answer. The other people just said, ‘Well, this.'” Well, we don’t do it that way here. We want to consider other things for you.

Oh.

Is it overthinking then?

Maybe our default in society should be to award people who take a pause, to award people who are considerate, who think deeply about something, who actually pause, take a breath, and take the time to consider what the right answer is.

Maybe we’d be in a better place.

As always, thanks for listening. I welcome your comments. Take care.

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Thank you for listening, as always. Go to markbradford.org to see all my author-related things. Go to Alchemy for Life to see coaching, speaking, writing, and this podcast.

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