Notes - Thinking Is Overrated

Here we go again with advice I should follow myself.

It's much easier to think yourself out of doing than to actually start doing something.

Thinking is a superpower. It can be medicine to get you where you want to go.
But we live in such a left-brained world we forgot that thinking is a tool, not a monarch. Thinking too much turns medicine into poison, afflicting your action-taking ability with the disease of "yes, but...".

From my own experience, this kind of thinking is less prevalent in the United States but a pandemic in European countries. I love entrepreneurship and startups, but from my experience, getting new ideas on track is harder on our continent. There's so much talent here, yet the culture's not just a little more reserved in social interactions, but also when it comes to risk-taking. In the last couple of years, we clearly thought too much. Even our bureaucracy has a bureau of bureaucracy – instead of the bubonic plague we now have the bureaucratic plague.

The fear that what you create might suck is probably the greatest hindrance. But the first draft of anything is never good enough. Yet this belief somehow seeped so deeply into our culture that it's now the primary source on how we water the soil of our youth.
We always think of what could go wrong instead of what could go right. This has its advantages. I love my home country not just for its beauty, but also because it's designed like a Swiss watch: everything just works. This is possible because some very smart people did a lot of very difficult thinking. But in the end, they also made it reality.

And this is exactly the point. Because ideas are only gold when you smelt them down into their essence, and then smith them into something real. Otherwise, ideas are not just cheap, but worthless. More often than not, working out the perfect blueprint is just procrastination. Just pick up the hammer and start swinging.