All right, let's see here. We've got a written question. This one's from Overthinker. Overthinker says, "What do you think about overthinking? "And how do you deal with or recommend dealing with it? "This is a general problem I face, "and I have always had, but never had a way of dealing with.

"I have this as far as career job decisions are concerned, "certain life decisions as well, "and by overthinking and overanalyzing "the potential options, I end up in a scenario "where I'm more confused than before. "How do you recommend dealing with this? "Thank you." All right, well, Overthinker, typically the issue, and this is a common problem, but typically the issue at stake with this problem is that you're stuck in the mental schema of a right-wrong decision binary.

So that the mental framework you're using when thinking about decisions is that there is a right decision and multiple wrong decisions. If you can find a right decision, there is great rewards to it. If you miss it and end up on a wrong decision, there is great punishment. Now, when you have the stakes of a binary, you are really gonna worry about that decision because I don't wanna miss the right decision here.

It could lead to quite a bit of hardship if I get it wrong. That is fertile ground for growing overthinking. So the big shift in mental frame that's gonna help you here is move away from this idea that there's right and wrong decisions, and your goal is to not mess up and accidentally do the wrong instead of the right.

In many different areas where there's big decisions to make, there are many different ways forward that are completely compatible with reward or goodness or whatever it is that you're looking to maximize. What matters much more than the decision is what you do once you make it. Now, where this is made really clear is in career decisions, which you mentioned there.

We talked about in an earlier question, which I wrote a whole book about, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." So let's focus on that briefly. Zoom in on that briefly here for a second. One of the big ideas in that book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," is that people often fell into this right-wrong binary decision frame when it came to career choices.

There's a right job for me that matches some sort of magical fairy tale inborn passion for that job. If I find that job, I'll be happy. If I miss it, I'll be miserable. So people obsess over what job am I going to do. And as I argued in "So Good They Can't Ignore You," the decision of what job you do is actually in some sense of minor importance.

You're not wired for one particular pursuit. You're not wired to be the social media brand manager for a digital media consultancy. There's no particular job that happens to be around in the 21st century knowledge economy that you have to do because of your DNA. And if you miss it, you'll be unhappy.

The reality is there's probably many, many different jobs that could be the foundation of a passionate, fulfilling career. So just choose one that seems reasonable. Great. What matters is what you do next. And that's where we get into career capital theory. That's where we get into becoming so good you can't be ignored.

Using that unambiguous skill as leverage to shape your job towards things, towards resonate and away from things that don't, eventually arriving at an ideal lifestyle. The choice of job, eh. What you do once you make the choice, oh yeah, that matters. So we can extend that to almost any major decision.

Here's what I would ask. Do I have evidence that this particular decision opens up good options for me that will move me closer to the properties of my desired lifestyle? If the answer is yes, are there other options which are also tractable that would be demonstrably more successful at moving me towards properties compatible with my ideal lifestyle?

If the answer to that is no, so yes, no, then great, go ahead. So this seems good, I'll simplify the language here. This seems good, it opens up cool opportunities, it leads me in a direction I could imagine constructing a good deep life around that. And there's not some obvious alternative that's way better.

I don't care if there's a lot of alternatives that are similar. There's not one that is obviously way better. Good, go for it, commit. And there might be six different options that satisfy this. Flip a, roll a six sided die, I don't care. Choose something that seems good, opens up opportunities.

There's not some obviously much better answer. The interesting thing is then what you do next, which is once you've made the choice, all right, now what do I wanna do? I've chosen this job, I've decided to get married, I've decided to have kids, I've decided to move to this completely different environment.

Great, you've made the decision. How now do you build a life around that decision that leverages and maximizes what's good about it, sidesteps to potential traps, that allows you to extract from it all of the possibilities for a deeper life for that ideal lifestyle. So that's the frame shift.

The decision is easy. Don't make an obviously bad choice, but if something seems reasonable, that's good enough. Put more energy into what you do next. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)