Good morning Achievers,

My mission is to help you achieve your dreams faster, make more out of your time, and ultimately become the best version of yourself.

I guess you know that by now.

This obsession started long ago when I realized how much time I was— and especially how much other people were—wasting.

It clicked in my brain after being stuck making a decision for HOURS.

A simple, easy, non-important decision, but I just couldn’t make up my mind. I think this feeling traps like 90% of all entrepreneurs.

When you just can’t think clearly and pretend you need more and more information for a decision.

Things that held me back were:

• “I’m too young”

• “I don’t have the knowledge”

• “I don’t have the tools”

• “I’m just too scared”

So how can you avoid this kind of procrastination? That’s what we’ll discuss now.

Make up your mind

The first thing we need to do—the foundation—is to embrace the right thinking.

Because the truth is, there’s technically no advantage in overthinking.

Here’s the math:

Situation 1:

You need to make a decision, but delay it for 2 days.

Then in 2 days you make the decision, which maybe turns out right and maybe wrong. We don’t know.

Situation 2:

You need to make a decision, get all the facts together quickly, and make it within minutes.

Then you get immediate feedback on this decision—whether it was right or wrong.

Based on this feedback, you can make adjustments and gain experience.

So in the first situation, you’re left with maximum uncertainty, while in the second one you know there’s no perfect decision, only learning from your actions.

Therefore, you moved forward, which in the best case brought you success and in the worst case a good lesson.

Takeaway: Never, never, never aim for perfect decisions. They won’t come.

Aim for fast improvement and learning.

Just move

Because I was tired of all this overthinking, I’ve developed a strategy that I call “just move.”

With this you quickly grasp all the information you have and then make a decision based on it.

At one point I tried to just shut off my thinking completely and just did something, because otherwise I’d just sit there, not able to move for hours until I decided what to do.

The truth is, even if what you decide to do is wrong, but you’re moving regardless, you’ll still be ahead of those people who didn’t move in the first place because they’re still overthinking.

Takeaway: When faced with a small decision and you can’t make up your mind, just move.

Set a time limit for how long you want to spend on this decision, and if it takes longer than 5–10 minutes, just do something.

It will always be better than doing nothing at all.

Overthinking for personal branding

I often hear from people that they’re afraid of posting.

They don’t know whether people will like it or not, so they keep doing nothing.

Tip: You will never know if people like it or not unless you ask them or show it to them.

Hit post. If you think you can’t, do it regardless.

Later you’ll have the performance data of this post and can make adjustments, but if you don’t have this data, your mind simply creates its own reasons to make the decision seem harder than it actually is.

Train your decision making

Just like almost everything else, it’s all about practice.

The more you practice moving fast, the faster you’ll be at it.

The good part is, if you set yourself a limit of maximum 5 minutes for a decision, you can’t overthink anymore. You NEED to do something.

And even if you have zero information about whether it’s a good move or not, your gut feeling is definitely something you should use to make a fast decision.

Make sure you don’t stand still.

If you can’t make up your mind, the answer is no

Let’s assume you don’t need to decide between A and B, but between yes or no.

If yes or no means a big change in your life and you’re not sure whether you should do it or not, you probably shouldn’t.

Only use the “just move” technique for smaller decisions.

Highly important decisions

The whole thing looks different when we look at very important decisions like moving your location or something else that directly affects your whole life.

This should be considered extremely well.

The difference between overthinking and a well-made, long decision process for a highly important topic is simply that with overthinking you’re afraid of doing something, and with deciding slowly but intentionally, you’re actively thinking for the best option.

Overthinking: Passive thinking (no results)

Deciding: Active thinking (results)

For example, if you’re changing your location, you know that this will maybe change your life for some years.

Then you should use at least 10–20% of the expected time to think the whole thing over.

That means, when changing your location will impact your life for 5 or 10 years, you should think it over for 1–2 years before actually making the move.

Quote of the week:

Hope you all have a productive week!

See you,

Eli