How to Stop Overthinking (and Finally Achieve Your Goals)

Now, most people don't fail to start because they're lazy. They overthink because they think they need to know everything before they get started. But look at this graph. This is everything you could know about a topic, but this little bit over here, this is what you actually need to know to get started. In this episode of Book Club, the ongoing series, where for the last five years, I've been sharing my thoughts and recommendations from some of my favourite books, we are diving into Pat Flynn's Lean Learning, a system designed to help you stop overthinking, get unstuck and actually make progress with whatever you wanna do. All right, so let's start with key point number one. And for that, I would like to draw your attention to this little chart on page 33 of the book. Now, this is a chart that I wish could be seared into the brains of so many friends of mine and also so many people who I speak to who attend events where if I'm doing a talk or something, like a lot of people will have the question of like, I know I want to do Thing X, whether Thing X is starting a business, or starting a side hustle, or starting a YouTube channel, or I mean, it's normally those three things that people come to me for advice for. But they are stuck in this mode of like endless research. They keep on trying to research more and more and more stuff. And I think what they don't realise is that actually, you need a very small amount of information to get started. And once you get started, that is when, once you're taking step after step, that's when you can kind of be doing all the research and doing all the learning. But it all comes from a foundation of actually taking action and doing the goddamn thing. And in fact, Pat literally has a subtitle, JFGS, just get started. I clicked the end of my pen and started writing that down in my notebook. Stop writing ---- down. There's nothing more to write. Come on, just do it already. I had never seen my business coach this upset before. In fact, this was the first time I'd ever heard him swear. I guess I pushed him to the boiling point. So Pat talks about hiring this business coach called Jeremy. And he's been having like weekly meetings with Jeremy trying to get his first business off the ground. We'd been meeting like this every other week at the same cheesecake factory for a few months. But this time Jeremy was pissed. I closed my notebook and locked eyes with him because I knew he wasn't finished with me yet. Pat, he continued, you have a whole notebook of strategies, but you still haven't launched your book yet. You're helping nobody with a notebook full of plans. And so Pat was procrastinating for absolutely ages before starting his first business back in 2008, which was like an ebook for architects or something like that. And he writes, from the dozens of blogs and podcasts I was subscribed to at the time, to the business books I purchased from Barnes & Nobles because I already had read half the material in the store, I was always in search mode. On the surface, I was searching for some magical answer, a eureka moment you could say, some piece of content that would make my new endeavor a lot easier. But in retrospect, all I was doing was searching for something to hide behind. And that something was learning. I think this is a really solid point that more people need to hear. If you are a smart person, which you probably are if you watch this channel, you're probably very intelligent, you're also probably very good looking, then you're probably used to trying to do things right. You and I, we were taught in school and we were conditioned from a very young age that we had to do the right things. And if you got a failure mark in an exam, or if you're like some of us and you got anything less than 100% in the exam, that would feel bad. And so the solution that we as kids realize is that we're not gonna do anything unless we are fully certain that that thing is gonna do well. And we substitute learning for action. And this is what school and sometimes even our parents literally conditions us to do from a young age. But the key point here, which I really like is when you become an adult and you're out in the real world, especially when you are trying to do something like start a business, or put yourself out there in any capacity or do anything creative, there is no rule book for the thing. There is no checklist and examiner report and syllabus and official curriculum that you need to follow. And if you just learned enough things, then of course you would get 100% in the exam. And the thing with learning is that learning feels super productive. It feels like watching a YouTube video or reading a business book or whatever, that feels like it's you making productive progress towards doing the thing like starting the business or whatever. But if we come back to this graph, all of this is the information that you could know about a given topic. And this is just all the information you need to get started, which is a way smaller amount of information than most people think. And I found myself thinking of an analogy while I was reading the book. So imagine learning how to ride a bicycle. You probably know how to ride a bicycle, right? Now, how much information is there to know about riding a bike? There's all of this stuff around like the gear and the suspension and like the wheels and the foamy bits you put on your bum and your shorts. There is all of this information out there. But if you don't yet know how to ride a bike, it would be really dumb to try and consume all the information that a Tour de France competitive cyclist needs to learn to be ahead of the game. The information you had was probably from someone who taught you how to ride a bike that was like basically sit on, maybe stick the training wheels on and just keep pedaling. And maybe they hold onto the bike a little bit so that you don't feel the fear of falling off and then you get the hang of it. And yeah, maybe you fall over a couple of times, but obviously that process was necessary for you to learn the skill of riding the bike. And then if you wanna take cycling more seriously, once you know how to ride a bike, at that point you can then research the next level, which is like, okay, cool, what's a fancier bike? And then like, how do I aerodynamically like position myself? And then how do I get the shoe clip-on-y thingies that can clip onto the pedals? And the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I see this question so often amongst the people that I speak to, which is that you're doing basically the equivalent of trying to consume Olympic cycling level information before you have even learned how to ride a bike. And you think if you consume more and more and more information, at some point, you'll magically feel ready and able to do the thing, but you're never gonna feel ready to do the thing. Any new thing that you try and do is always gonna involve a little bit of a leap of faith. Now, if one of the things that you're looking to take action on is potentially anything to do with being a creator and or starting your own business, then you're definitely gonna wanna check out Poppy AI, who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Poppy AI is the first, and as far as I know, only visual AI tool out there. 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If you'd like to check it out, then head over to getpoppy.ai slash Ali Abdaal or scan the QR code on screen, and you'll get $25 off the subscription with the code Ali at checkout. So thank you so much Poppy AI for sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it. Let's say you're one of the many people out there who's like not yet started the thing because you don't feel ready enough. You're overthinking the thing, you're overplanning, you're overlearning, and maybe you're consuming this amount of information. Like really, all you needed was just a tiny amount of information to get started, but because you didn't feel ready, you were watching all these YouTube videos, you were reading all these books, you were listening to all these podcasts, you were doing all these things. And I'm gonna label this information you consume because of fear. You are scared of doing the thing, and what you're doing by consuming all this information is that you are hoping it will reduce your fear. When you're in school and you are scared of taking the exam because you wanna do well, and you know you haven't studied enough, you know that the solution to that fear would have been to study harder for the exam. If you had studied harder, if you'd consumed more information, you would have been less afraid of the exam. But the thing to realize is that when you're trying to do anything creative, when you're trying to start your business, when you're trying to make money on the internet, whatever the things that you're working on, the pattern that you learned in school, which is that more information equals less fear, actually does not hold true. And I think all of this extra information tends to hold people back rather than facilitate their journey into the business. And some people might be thinking, yeah, well, if I get more information, it reduces my risks of failure. If I learn more about how to start a business, then most businesses fail, so I'm less likely to fail. And again, I would gently suggest that that is not actually true. Yes, there is a small amount of minimum viable information you need to start a business. But usually what happens and the pattern that I've seen play out repeatedly is that the more information you consume about the thing, the more you learn about the thing before taking action, that extra information actually often will put you off from doing the thing. Now, there is a graph here that you might be familiar with. So when you think about starting anything, you generally feel pretty positive about the thing. Oh, you know, I could start a YouTube channel, I could start a business. This is uninformed optimism. So you start off with uninformed optimism, you start doing the thing and over time you realize very quickly when you start doing the thing that actually the thing is harder than you thought it would be. And you enter this kind of a dip area. There is a wonderful book by Seth Godin with the title of The Dip that you should check out as well. Now, what a lot of people will do is that they'll start something, they'll do it for a bit, they'll get to the point where it starts to feel hard, they'll get to the dip, and then they'll think that they suck because they find the thing really hard. And then they will give up on the thing and go right back to the beginning and pursue a different opportunity. These are the people that start 18 different businesses and never see any one of them through. These are the people that maybe start a YouTube channel and they keep on switching niches because they're like, oh, it's not working, it's not working, it's not working, it's not working. Now, it's unfortunate for these sorts of people because when they feel the thing getting harder, they end up quitting and just starting again, which means they never actually see anything through to completion. But there is a category of person that's even more sad than this because you know what that person does? You know, at least what they did is they got started and then they gave up. Whereas the overthinkers and the overlearners amongst us, and this used to be me back in the day, thankfully it's not me anymore, will do so much research that in the process of doing the research, they will realise, oh my goodness, this thing is harder than I thought it would be. And they give up on doing the thing before even taking that first step. But the thing is, for most interesting and therefore uncertain things in life, it's actually very useful to start out with uninformed optimism. It's useful to not really realise how hard the thing is gonna be when you're just getting started. And it's useful to just take the action because the more action you take, the more momentum you have in the thing, and then you're able to sort of push through the difficult bits. When you speak to people who've started and scaled a successful business, and you ask them, hey, if you'd known how hard it was gonna be, would you have gotten started? And they often say, if I had known how hard it was gonna be, it probably would have put me off from starting in the first place. So I'm glad I didn't know how hard it was gonna be because by the time I'd started, that gave me the momentum to see the thing through and actually complete it. And now on the other side of that, they're living a life they absolutely love, they've got freedom, they've got fulfilment, they've got like flexibility, they can do what they want, they don't have to do things they don't wanna do. But that goal of the freedom to be able to do what you want and the freedom to be able to say no to things you don't wanna do, that is a goal that the only real way to get there is by doing difficult and uncertain things where the probability of success is not guaranteed, because if the probability of success was guaranteed, everyone would be doing the thing. The more you research the thing, the more likely you are to become more scared of doing the thing and less likely to take action beyond the point of minimum viable learning. Now, if we ask people like what sort of thing they're actually scared of, usually two different sort of categories of fear will come in for whatever the thing is. One category is I'm afraid of making mistakes and I'm afraid of failing at the thing. And the second one is I am afraid people will laugh at me. It sounds a bit trite to say it that way, but essentially the reason you haven't yet done the thing that you've been wanting to do is because on some level, you're afraid that some people will laugh at you. I was afraid of public humiliation when I first started my YouTube channel. I made like 15 videos on my YouTube channel before I posted about it at all on like Facebook and Instagram and like letting my friends and family know. I was just doing it in silence because I was so afraid that people were gonna laugh at me. And then I posted a link on Facebook and I realised no one actually cared. No one was laughing at me, no one was looking at me. Yeah, some people in medical school were like, oh, let me put the camera away, like what's wrong with you? But those same people, like after the channel became successful, were all like clamouring to be in videos and stuff. And so when I was feeling this fear of public humiliation and public criticism, you know, there are a couple of books that helped. I read Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, which I have somewhere here, which is a really good book that really helps with this. And this is something Pat talks about in his book as well, where he was held back from starting his first business because of the fear of what other people will think. And I feel really passionate about this because that was literally a thing that held me back for like seven years, from 2010 to 2017. That's how long it took me to start my YouTube channel, despite thinking about it for seven years, because ultimately I was thinking, I don't want this to be bad, I don't want this to suck, I need to do more research, I need more gear. And so if I can shortcut that process for anyone by watching this video, you know, like reading this book, for example, there's other books like, you know, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield or Show Your Work by Austin Kleon. These are all books from people that have recognised that this fear thing holds so many of us back and it really needn't do that. And so to end this point, I would like to leave you with a journaling prompt, which is, in what ways am I allowing information gathering to prevent me from taking action? If that resonates with you at all, then I'd love to hear in a comment down below what that is for you. Anyway, let's move on to key point number two, which is mistakes. So we've talked about how basically no one gives a ---- about you anyway. And so like, you don't need to worry about them laughing at you because they probably won't care. But the other big fear people have is the fear of failure and the fear of making mistakes. The fear of, I don't wanna waste time doing something that might not work. The fear of, I wanna sort of preemptively avoid failure, I don't wanna make mistakes and all of this sort of stuff. And again, this is an attitude that's trained into us by school, where if you make mistakes on an exam, you literally lose points and those points cost you a grade and that grade costs you a university place, which costs you a good job in theory. And so all of these systems of conditioning that we get when we're younger are all about teaching us to avoid making mistakes. And there is a nice little quote from here, as John Lee Dumas, a friend and host of the popular podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire, once said, you have to be a disaster before you become the master. Or as Pat likes to say to people who are trying to build a YouTube channel or any kind of creative thing, you have to be cringe before they binge. Now this is an idea that you're probably familiar with, right? Like if you're at this point in the video, you've probably heard the idea that you should reframe failure as a learning opportunity and you should learn from your mistakes and all that kind of stuff. But again, common sense is not common practice and it's very different for us to intellectually know something and then to also embody the thing in our own mind, heart, body, soul, such that we actually take action based on this supposed knowledge that we have. Now there's a bunch of useful stuff in the book that you should definitely check out, but I'm gonna tell you about the way that I kind of got over my own fear of making mistakes. And this was actually because of a lecture that we had in our second year of med school that was all about neuroscience. And it was this argument that our brains are essentially a prediction machine. The brain gets very good at trying to predict what's gonna happen in the world around it. So let's say I drop this pen. Your brain intuitively understands gravity and understand that when the pen is here and I drop it, it's gonna do that, right? Easy enough. But if instead you were to see the pen doing this, that would be pretty surprising. Your brain registers surprise because reality has not matched with its expectations. So the brain makes a prediction or an expectation about what's gonna happen, then reality happens and the brain registers surprise if reality did not match its prediction. Now, the crucial insight is that all of learning happens when you experience surprise. If reality matches your brain's prediction of what's going to happen, there is no signal to learn anything because that would just be, it would be a nightmare. If every time you saw the world conforming to what you thought it would, your brain would be completely overloaded with all the information that's always around you. So what has to happen is that in order for you to learn, you have to be surprised, i.e. reality must not conform to your expectations for learning to happen. Now, this leads us to an interesting problem because if we want to learn and we know that learning is when reality does not conform to our expectations, then really learning almost by definition happens when we make mistakes. If you do something and then things go according to plan, you're not gonna learn because your brain does not register that as a signal of surprise. But if you do something and then things don't go according to plan, you register that as a mistake, your brain registers that as surprise and then you end up learning from that experience. Now, when you experience that surprise of like reality not conforming to expectations, you could think, yay, I'm learning something or you could do what some people think and their minds naturally go to, which is I'm a failure. I started my first business, it did not go as well as I thought it would, therefore, I'm a failure. That is a thought process you could have or you could have the thought process of, I started my first business, it didn't go as I thought it would, but through the process, I've learned a bunch of things and so the next time I start a business, I hopefully won't make those same mistakes. It's exactly the same situation. You started a business that hasn't worked out, but in one, your mind tells you that you're a failure and you believe that thought and in the other one, you don't believe the thought that you're a failure and you tell yourself, you know what? I'm gonna learn from the experience and then in the book, there's a bunch of really good stuff around like making mistakes leads to you understanding the thing better, leads to more resilience and how mistakes lead to innovation and how basically every good thing happens when we embrace making mistakes. The final thing I would like to talk about is what Pat Flynn calls the lean learning method and I really like this and it sounds really simple and it's gonna sound trite maybe, but I think, again, common sense is not common practice and I wish more people followed this kind of process when they were starting new things, starting businesses, all this sort of stuff. It's also a lesson that I need to learn for myself because I also have a tendency to overthink and overanalyze stuff. Where is it? All right, so this is the lean learning method. Step one, identify the next step in your journey, whatever your journey is. Step two, gather the minimum amount of information required to complete that step and I have highlighted minimum amount of information in green because that is the thing that I wish more people knew. It's like the goal is minimum viable information, not maximum possible information and then step three, take action and complete the step and I've highlighted take action in red because again, that is the thing that more people need to hear. Honestly, if there's one thing you take away from this video and if you're at the video at this point and the thing that I wish I could sear into the brain of everyone who ever asked me this sort of stuff is like probably what's holding you back is that you're trying to learn too much stuff and probably what's holding you back is that you're not taking enough action. So we wanna sort of shift the equation from more action and less learning rather than more learning and less action which is where a lot of people who follow the channel, you know, the smart and very good looking ones tend to fall into. And then once you've done step number three, rinse and repeat and you go back to step number one. This is the lean learning process that he talks about in the book. Again, it sounds super simple. It sounds really basic AF, right? Like what's the next step? What's the information I need to complete the next step? Great, I'm gonna complete the next step and then I'm gonna repeat the process. But like honestly, this is the one foot in front of the other process that literally everything in life happens because of this kind of process of one foot in front of the other. There are very few things that happen where you've gotta start out by knowing everything and by making a perfect plan and then executing perfectly on your perfect plan. All right, so this video has just scratched the surface of all the stuff in the book. If you are vibing with this topic, if you find yourself overthinking and overplanning and over-researching like I sometimes often do in my life and that like I know so many of my audience do, I would definitely recommend checking out the book. And if you're interested in more techniques on how to actually take action and achieve your goals, then you might like to check out this video over here, which contains like five or six evidence-based, very easy, small, tiny things you can do to drastically increase the chances that you'll achieve your goals. So thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in that video, bye bye.