Why I picked it up
I am someone who thinks a lot. Before any choice I run through an unreasonable number of possibilities, and somewhere in that process I get anxious. It is worst when I am starting something new or standing in front of people: what if this fails, what if I put myself forward and look ridiculous, going around and around.
It makes me careful, which is not nothing. It also slows me down and costs me chances.
That is why I read Stop Overthinking. I wanted out of the state where thinking ties me up, and I wanted a reason to move a plan out of my head and into something real. At the time I was working on Gunner Up — a service for Arsenal supporters like me, and more broadly something whose purpose is to help quiet, shy, inward people find courage. I still did not know what form it would take. What I wanted from this book was a hint about how a person who thinks too much manages to act at all.
What the book says
Nick Trenton argues that overthinking is not a personality problem but a habit that grows out of anxiety and fear. We repeat thoughts in order to avoid risk, and the repetition is what enlarges the anxiety and blocks the action.
The shape of it is roughly this. First, understand why we become addicted to thinking: the insistence on acting only when perfectly prepared, the fear of other people’s judgement, the wish to control the future. None of that produces a better outcome — more thinking does not equal a better result.
What he offers instead is the importance of small actions. Rather than trying to eliminate the anxiety, repeat the actions you can take while carrying it. Actions accumulate into experience, and experience produces a conviction far stronger than thinking ever does.
The part that struck me hardest was the reframing: not execute after a perfect plan, but execute from an incomplete state.
What I took from it
Most of the projects on this site were finished badly at least once. I used to treat that as evidence I should have planned longer. I have stopped doing that.
Gunner Up is still incomplete and I am building it anyway, which is the only part of this I can honestly say the book changed.