Analysis paralysis is an extremely real, and terrifying problem. Much of the time we are told to think things through, almost anyone who drops out, and even many who succeed say that they wish they thought more before they made decisions.
So many people go to school for something they never really cared about, so many people are stuck at jobs that they never wanted to take. So often do I choose to do things that I later regret.
The important thing is avoiding sitting and thinking for too long, as this can keep you from getting anything done. If you want to write a book, write, if you want to start a business, start selling something. This advice seems cliche and is unwanted by nearly everyone, including myself but it is truly neccessary to achieve anything. Take the smallest possible action, the minimum effective dose, and this should lead to results over the long term.
I like the framing that we should be impatient but patient with results. If every time we wonder if we could be better suited in another career path, what is stopping one from blitzing though a series of free online classes, or attempting to take on a small workload of said field.
Once again this advice is good, but there is a certain nature of person that this accommodates. The same people who naturally or easily follow this advice are the type who succeed as entrepreneurs or at the top of any field.
So much of who we are is crafted on purpose, by ourselves or others matters not. Instead of viewing things as finding oneself, we should view it as creating ourselves through repetitive action. The truest harm of too much time inside on screens is that there is less self creation, we are not risk taking, we are not creating self confidence through appreciation of others.
If you had to help a friend build self confidence, you would likely flatter them, have them constantly doing things that deserve rewards. One of these things is letting them watch themselves succeed over and over. So why not do the same for ourselves? Find a specific domain where we cannot seem to lose, and then dive into it. The problem is that this often takes quite a long time to find, I am not going to blow up on my 6th blog post, or my 20th tweet. You are not going to invest in the 100 bagger after 1 day of research. What is the minimum effective dose to find the niche we are accidentally built for, what is the fastest way to find if we are built for these things?
I don’t know. I do know that you will never find them if you do not try to, and that you cannot find out you are amazing at something with zero exposure to it. You could have the perfect bone structure and musculature for rock climbing, and you would never know unless you were fit enough to attempt it. The same thing applies to work and schooling, it is highly important to build a fundamental knowledge of many different fields, so that you are not gatekept from any one field. However I find that it is much better to stick to the things that you are good at, and with a lifetime of work, you may be able to turn your greatest weakness into something you are average, or slightly above average at. But if you find the thing that you are best at, you can be better than everyone at that thing.
There are great polymaths, but they always get there by following genuine curiosity and following things relentlessly, not by forcing themselves to do things they hate until they are amazing at everything, in intellectually studies this type of thing is nearly impossible. If your brain hates something, you cannot trick it to be interested, and someone who is interested in something and naturally loves to do it will always beat someone who secretly hates it.
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