Overthinking
kerkour.comI'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?
> 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.
We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.
I think that's exactly right.
If you run into traffic and get hit by a car, the conversation is about that, not "under thinking" because the impact is painful and obvious.
However, it's more subtle for someone to notice that it takes you 30 minutes to cross the street because you're way too cautious, and the impact of that ("you could be doing a lot more with your life than standing here") is less obvious.
To add to this:
- Look before you leap. - Measure twice, cut once. - Stay silent and have people think you're a fool, open your mouth and confirm it.
I'm sure there are many more common idioms pointing towards the idea of "think before you act".
Where I'm from we have similar sayings:
- Don't dive head first into water.
- Measure nine times, cut once.
And a random saying I just remembered: "Autumn has the eyes of a summer and the teeth of a wolf."
Edit:formatting
Err. What does that last one mean?
Maybe that:
- being late (acting in "autumn") ...looks/feels similar to
- being on time (seizing the moment at the right point, in "summer")
...but has a nasty bite?
The trouble is those phrases are all quite hostile whereas telling someone they are overthinking can't be construed to mean "your stupid".
Giggling at the irony of telling someone "your stupid".
"This may be more important that it at first seems."
> 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.
Very good point.
> 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 believe that it's largely a cultural thing.
For instance, in French companies, US Americans definitely have the reputation of underthinking things (which US employees feel is "being productive"). Reciprocally, in US companies, the French have a reputation for overthinking them (which French employees feel is "assessing risks").
One more reason for which balancing cultures (and backgrounds, etc) is actually really important for the future of a company: we all have different blind spots.
> we all have different blind spots.
I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.
In America, if there's no law against it you can do it.
In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.
Would you care to give a few examples? Where something was forbidden _without any law_ and then later allowed _with a law_?
Well there are so many rules and official norms (approx. 400,000) and exceptions about pretty much anything in France that this is pretty accurate... Just look up the rules of the road regarding phone calls while driving for examples and see how it has evolved over time: specifically holding the phone was forbidden but using headphones were explicitly allowed until the latter also got banned by another law a few years back. Now to have calls we must put our phones on speakers (but not too loud) and use both hands for driving, effectively forbidding us to give any calls while driving all that without explicitly saying so.
It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets
What you said about France is absolutely not true.
Article V of the French constitution:
> The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.
Given that the US constitution was greatly influenced by the French one, and given France's influence and substantial aid in helping to establish the USA as an independent country it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could believe this, unless they were completely unaware of both French and American history and culture.
> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this".
I mean, probably not with those exact words, but isn't that essentially the feedback you would get for almost any mistake you make at work that was foreseeable but not foreseen? Or even things like a code review, where pretty much all comments are of the form "you might want to consider how this effects OtherSystemX," which is a more helpful way of saying "you might be failing to think about something you ought to think about."
That's exactly right. Under-thinking is often more obvious in terms of consequences so you talk about those.
> I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong.
If you're like me, this is probably because the time spent thinking wasn't necessarily productive. It wasn't spent thinking about the right things, or about the things in the right way, with the right understanding or knowledge, etc.
This is hard to overcome because at least in my case this occurs because of a lack of understanding of what I'm doing, or perhaps a worry that I won't execute on something as well as I believe I could. But in there lies a significant problem. My overthinking is motivated by 1) impressions and hypotheticals (could I actually execute better? And what if I don't need to understand the problem better? What if there is no attainable solution to the problem that's better enough to warrant researching it?) and 2) insecurities like fear of failure, fear of being wrong, of appearing incompetent.
I often overthink because I want to do the best job I can (good) but... I want to do it on my first try (bad). I end up with massively diminishing returns on the thinking I do because of the first point mentioned above. I'm pursuing something that is arguably imaginary, and if I make good progress it's often pure luck rather than a calculated, predictable step forward.
This is what makes it overthinking in my case. I'm wasting my energy and potential. I could act on what I know much sooner and be more productive, then revise my work with what I learn in the process or what I learn later. I should move forward with a better balance of confidence and critcal thinking, being sure to consider what I know carefully, how well I understand what I'm engaging in, but also knowing that I'm acceptably competent and that I'll learn more by doing.
Easy to say, harder to do. But I do believe I lose a lot of my potential to overthinking. It becomes more neurotic than effective after a point. I'm often unaware that I'm even doing it; almost like I'm addicted to the process of analyzing, deconstructing, reconsidering, starting again. It feels somehow safer than taking the risk of making a (likely correctable) mistake!
I agree that underthinking, or I suppose an absence of thinking, should be more critically considered and addressed when it occurs. It's a much different beast though. I believe they occur for perhaps entirely different reasons.
- 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.
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)
Relax the amount of overthinking people do is negligible compared to the amount of under thinking. Overthinking is not a problem, seriously.
This guy in the article only thinks it's a problem because people are acutely aware of overthinking. They are completely unaware of under thinking.
There are simply too many topics in the world to think about so in order to make sense of the world at a macro level you under think almost everything.
I mean the guy is a software engineer OF COURSE he overthinks software related stuff. Guaranteed he's under thinking most of everything else.
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.
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?
These things, in different forms, happen frequently, unfortunately.
It would be interesting to know how many times the outcome is "hero" and how many "lizard", under which conditions, in which contexts etc.
"Agile"/Scrum plannings is one example of rushing with design decisions in order to assign the tasks to developers.
Of course you can assign the design tasks, but the rest of the tasks are depend on the outcome of it, so it doesn't work in practice.
Waterfall on the other side, does overly encourages overthinking.
>I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong
Maybe you are just thinking? It only becomes overthinking when you have been at it for "too long". As in, it is not reasonable to guess that thinking more about it will be of value.
Of course, knowing when that is the case is hard. IMO we should spend more time figuring out when it is overthinking than warning people about overthinking.
I mean I have a clinical problem with overthinking (I am diagnosed with OCD) and I'm not disputing at all there are cases where overthinking is irrational and unproductive. I'm just pointing out that just like there are risks of overthinking, there are also risks of underthinking. And I usually see advises about how to prevent overthinking, and not underthinking. If I were to make a perfectly rational choice, I'd risk overthinking more than the opposite. So, although balance is ideal, if a balance is not possible (you don't have enough data to make a perfect decision) then I think, rationally speaking, you want to err slightly on the side of overthinking.
I cant even count how my "overthinking" and analytic conclusion has 90%+ hit rate but all my friends and colleagues told me I am overthinking it.
When 99% of the world are under thinking, not thinking it through or worst and most likely the case, not thinking at all, then of course the 1% are overthinking.
There are downside to overthink on small things, procrastination.
If you accuse somebody of overthinking, it’s almost a compliment in that they are too intelligent and might get them to reconsider. If you accuse them of being thoughtless, it’s like saying they are unintelligent, and you made an enemy who will resist changing their mind
It's not that thinking more is bad, it's just not always the best thing to be doing. You could also make a decision tentatively and revisit when more information is available. The costs of this could be much less than you fear or assume.
> I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this".
"We need to think about it more" definitely exists. "We need to turn it into proper plan first" exists too.
the issue is that those meta-tools - fallacies, razors, poe/godwin/etc. laws, "otherthinking", etc. - are primarily intended for people to be able to improve the quality and manage the deficiencies of their own thinking, and instead the people weaponize it to use against other people's thinking.
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.
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.
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!
I may be misunderstanding you, but what you’re describing sounds like the classic idea of decision matrices.
brilliant
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.
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.
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.
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.
Would you mind sharing a TLDR?
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... )
"You're doing it all wrong." said someone doing nothing at all.
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.
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.
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
I guess the difference between an overthinker and having foresight is the rate of false positives?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
>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.
"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.
"[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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
> 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.
As a dev who was forced to learn functional programming i very much approve of #3.