Overthinking? No, underdoing!

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It’s the end of the year (2024), and looking back not just on the last year but probably the last two, I am pretty content with how things went. One particular theme I can recognize not just in retrospect but have also explicitly acted upon is that of intention and action: What do I want, and can I take steps towards that?

The most helpful thing I have read in the last year was probably this tweet and its immediate followup, which is part of an ad for some writing service (?) and best enjoyed out of context of the original thread:

We fear the pain of making the wrong choices. And worse, we fear regret.

[…]

You don’t have a thinking problem, you have an action problem

[…] people try to think their way out of problems that can only be solved with action.

Make action your default mode.¹

I do not know much about the tweet’s author Taylin John Simmonds, and the tweet just happened to show up in my feed, so do not take this as an endorsement of either the person or their general content.

To paraphrase: Your problem is not overthinking – it’s underdoing.

The framing of “underdoing instead of overthinking” resonates greatly with me. After all, the changes I have made in my life over the last two years were not about reducing, restricting, or controlling the amount, depth, or breadth of my thoughts: I am more inclined to think by nature, and I have more adventures left purely in the confines of my head than I will ever have time for.

No, the changes were about overcoming the fears that inhibit action. “Overcoming” here means “acknowledge the fear and then proceed anyway.” Do that constantly, consistently, and over time it gets better you get better.

In the small, I observe fear mostly in programming: Is this worth building? Do I even know what I am doing? Is this good enough? Are my opinions even worth stating? Should I use X or Y? Am I right about this? etc. – While programming is a discipline where you can get quite far with extensive thinking alone, thinking and doing will get you further: Thinking can give you insight, maybe. Doing on the other hand will give you learning and experience, even when you do the wrong things.

Fear is not rational, and a powerful tool to overcome fear is familiarity, and you get there by doing and interacting. I first noticed this in abstract mathematics: before you can fully embrace a concept, problem, or idea you need to overcome the fear and distance you have to it. I experience this familiarity as distinctly different from practical mastery of using or applying the idea, which especially in the context of mathematics still takes significant effort.

This familiarity also appears elsewhere, e.g. when repairing your parents’ printer: it’s not that you know more about their printer than they do, you are merely more familiar with technology and less afraid to try.

Over the last two years in particular, I have become a much more fearless (or less fearful?) programmer, which mostly means that (I believe) I make better decisions, quicker, and focus more on what matters. One part here is just programmer self-esteem, and for that it was helpful to switch jobs and experience that in a completely different environment I am still very good at what I am doing. Another part is practicing execution. This here helped:

• Accept more and larger reponsibilities, and work in a job where outcomes actually matter.
• Solve more concrete problems. Close doors if it helps. Implement plan B first.
• Take small steps and focus on today’s problems, mostly, while having a plan for the long run. I wrote about this in Programming Stamina.

For the next year, I hope to spend more timing painting in broad strokes so I get better at that specifically: more “create a good-enough first version” and less “polish version 2.0 to be even better”. More 80% solutions. More “let’s just try this.” More “creating”, less “changing.” This is in contrast to the last few year where a lot of my work focussed on oiling complex software machines and adjusting just the right screws precisely instead of ripping out entire pieces.

In the large (outside of programming), I have also taken plenty of actions that required overcoming a good bit of inertia and fear:

• I have started to more seriously learn to play an instrument, see 100 days of piano practice. Yes, I am still at it and playing piano. It took me a long while to be comfortable with the idea of repeated failure as systematic success but it has become second nature by now.
• In a similar vein, we moved countries again (for the last time, hopefully) and I am learning a language, see The Idiot Second.
• I have left two jobs, for very very different reasons. I finally started a business in earnest. I am excited to see where that goes, as it practically forces me to take on more decisions and actions way more often, and leaves me in an environment where constant doing is necessary for survival. It is also the main mechanism I hope to leverage to practice painting in broad strokes.

Finally, I have been quite active on this blog: 30 entries this year. You may not have realized this, but to me every blog post is an opportunity to screw up and look like a complete idiot to everyone I know, which in the spirit of this post I have embraced completely by now.