Do the thing

 

Chris Williamson

@ChrisWillx

I’ve been thinking about overthinking recently. Probably overthinking about overthinking to be honest. And I came across a tweet: “This is your annual reminder that you don’t need to resolve your issues, you don’t need to deal with your emotional baggage, you don’t need to process your trauma, you don’t need to confront your past, you don’t need to figure yourself out, you can just go ahead and do the thing.” —

@ESYudkowsky

We believe we need to prepare much more in imagination than reality. We can kid ourselves into believing that until we’ve got our head in the right place, we can’t move forward in the way we want to. We can’t leave that job or start that project or ask that person out who we fancy prior to ridding ourselves of the things we believe are holding us back. But life isn’t waiting for you. At all. Time will continue to tick along while you wait and try to create the optimal environment to finally make a move. Perfectionism is procrastination masquerading as quality control. Think about it this way. Guy 1 spends all day at work thinking about how he needs to go to the gym later on. The last time he went to the gym it was a bit uncomfortable. And he’s tired. And the gym was actually kind of mean and made him feel hurt. But he knows he needs to go. So he debates in his head all day. Should I go, shouldn’t I go? Am I ready, am I not ready? Eventually, using what feels like a superhuman effort, he finally drags himself to the gym and gets a session in. Guy 2 also needs to go to the gym. He also got a bit messed up last time he went. But he doesn’t think about it at all during the day, he knows he should go when work finishes, so he waits for work to finish. Then when the time comes, he grabs his bag and goes to the gym. The end result of both people is the same – they achieve the goal they wanted of going to the gym. But one has suffered and wasted 8 hours of precious life being distracted, and used a metric ton of willpower to achieve it because of fears and past traumas. Presuming that we need motivation or preparation to do things is often untrue. You don’t need motivation to do the thing. You just need to do the thing.