Chapter 24: When to Stop Analyzing and Start Living
Wen decided in January that she would run a 5K by spring, and by April she had not yet run a step. She had, however, done a great deal of preparation. She had read about running form, and about the dangers of starting to
Wen decided in January that she would run a 5K by spring, and by April she had not yet run a step.
She had, however, done a great deal of preparation. She had read about running form, and about the dangers of starting too fast. She had compared nineteen pairs of running shoes, and had narrowed them to three, and then, after a long evening of reading forum threads, to none. She had downloaded four training plans and could not decide between them. She had watched videos about breathing, cadence, and stretching. She had a playlist.
Every few days, she told herself that she was almost ready. The next step, she said, was to get the right shoes. Once she had the shoes, she would begin.
On a rainy Saturday in April, her neighbor Dolores, a woman in her sixties who had been running for decades, saw her carrying a shoebox out of the car and asked, “Are those for running?” Wen said that they were, in theory. Dolores glanced at the sky, at the wet pavement, at the shoes, and said, “Come on. We’ll do ten minutes.”
They ran for four minutes, and then walked, and then ran two more. Wen’s lungs burned. Her legs felt like wet sandbags. She was, by any measure, bad at it. And somewhere in the middle of the second walking interval, she realized that she had learned more in six minutes than in three months of reading.
Action is a kind of information
We tend to think of thinking as the way we prepare to act. But in many parts of life, action is also the way we learn. There are things that can only be discovered by trying: how a task actually feels, what turns out to be difficult, which of our fears were accurate and which were invented. Nobody can think their way to knowing what it feels like to run.
This is why analysis can be a trap. It feels productive, and it can feel like progress, but it often produces a diminishing return, as we saw in Chapter 5. After a certain point, further thought yields less and less, while a single real attempt yields a great deal. Wen’s first run taught her that her biggest obstacle was not her shoes, as she had assumed, but pacing. Three months of research had not told her that.
Analysis as avoidance
There is another, less comfortable possibility. Sometimes analysis is not preparation at all. It is avoidance in disguise.
Thomas Borkovec, whose work on worry we met in earlier chapters, proposed that worry can serve an avoidant function. It keeps us busy in the abstract, in thoughts and scenarios, and so spares us from facing something concrete and frightening. Planning forever is a way of never starting. Researching forever is a way of never risking being bad at it.
If you suspect that this may be true for you, you can ask a gentle but honest question: What am I protecting myself from by continuing to think about this? For Wen, the answer, when she finally looked at it, was the feeling of being a beginner, of being visibly slow and out of breath. The shoes were an excuse to wait until she could begin without that feeling. But there is no way to begin without it.
Motivation often follows action
Many of us believe that we must feel ready, or motivated, before we can act. I’ll start when I feel confident. I’ll begin once I’ve got more energy. But a good deal of psychological research, especially in the treatment of depression, suggests that the sequence often runs in the other direction.
The approach called behavioral activation, developed by researchers including Peter Lewinsohn and, later, Neil Jacobson and Christopher Martell, is built on a simple observation: when people feel low or stuck, they tend to withdraw from activity, and the withdrawal reduces the experiences that would have lifted their mood. The treatment encourages people to schedule and carry out meaningful activities regardless of how they feel, in the expectation that mood will follow action rather than precede it. It is one of the better-supported psychological treatments for depression. Chapter 19’s experiments tested a feared outcome. The practice in this chapter is different: it builds a repeatable loop of acting first and reviewing afterward.
You do not need to be depressed for the lesson to apply. If we wait to feel ready, we may wait a very long time. Ready is not a state you can reach by thinking. It is a state you enter by beginning.
How much information is enough?
Of course, it would be foolish to leap without any thought. The question is how to tell when you have what you need. A few rules of thumb:
Could one more piece of information change what I do? If not, you have enough. (This echoes the filter from Chapter 5.)
Is the risk reversible? If you can undo or adjust it, begin sooner. Reserve long deliberation for the choices that cannot be reversed.
Am I researching, or am I hiding? If you have been in the information-gathering phase for longer than the task deserves, ask honestly which it is.
Can I make the first step small enough? A step that is almost laughably small, like ten minutes of running and walking, is usually small enough to take.
Try this: Do, then debrief
The simplest and most reliable structure is a loop of three beats: decide the next action, do it, review it. It turns open-ended thinking into a short cycle of experience.
- Identify the next useful action. Not the whole project, just the next physical step. Put on the shoes I already own and go outside for ten minutes.
- Make it small and specific. Name when and where. Tomorrow at seven, around the block.
- Do it within twenty-four hours. Within a day, if possible. The longer the gap, the more the mind will talk itself out of it.
- Debrief in five minutes. Immediately afterward, ask three questions: What happened? What did I learn? What is the next step?
- Choose the next small action, and repeat.
The debrief is what turns activity into learning. Without it, you have simply done something. With it, you have gathered data that makes the next step wiser.
Wen kept the shoes she had in the box, since they would do for now, and ran three times a week. She wrote a line after each run. Run 1: too fast at the start, ran out of breath. Run 4: slower start, finished the whole loop. Run 9: enjoyed the second half. In June, she ran her first 5K. She came in near the back, and was ridiculously proud. On the way home, she stopped to buy new shoes, and by then she knew exactly what she needed.
Make the step embarrassingly small. If you still do not begin, the step is probably too big, or something else is in the way: fear, exhaustion, low mood. If difficulty starting is persistent and affects many parts of your life, speak to a doctor or therapist. Otherwise, the debrief matters as much as the doing, because it turns effort into learning.
A THOUGHT TO CARRY
Ready is not something you wait for. It is something you become by beginning.