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Many people try to ruminate their way out of a dilemma: where to live, which career to choose, how to go about meeting Mr./Ms. Right, etc.
My clients and I find it more helpful to, after modest reflection, jump to a low-risk action.
Let’s say I dropped you from a helicopter onto a frozen mountaintop. You can see the happy village down at the base and ten possible paths down. You’re most likely to make it if you quickly assess the ten, pick one, and if it turns out to be a sheer cliff, scramble back up and try another. And likely, having gone down a path, you’d see easier or more pleasant side paths you couldn’t have seen from the top. If instead, you stayed at the top, ruminating excessively about the right path, you would freeze and die.
Examples of more likely-to-occur, low-risk actions:
Choosing a career. After reviewing an annotated list of careers in the Occupational Outlook Handbook or my book, Careers for Dummies, Google-search to find an article or video (or three) about a few prospective careers and then just pick one. Additional exploration is unlikely to outweigh the benefit of getting started.
If the career turns out to be wrong for you, there are usually early opportunities to make a minor or even major pivot. And if your career is okay but could stand improvement, you’ll see ways to improve it that you couldn’t have seen until you entered the career. Too many people have waited on the sidelines for the perfect career, wasting years and, ironically, never finding it. If they had just picked the best of what they were considering based on modest exploration, they would have been far better off, maybe even have, little-by-little, accreted a near-perfect career.
For example, career counseling felt like my best but imperfect option. Only after having gotten into it did I realize that by adapting the standard career counseling approach to accentuate my strengths and skirt my weaknesses, and by adding public speaking and writing, I’d be happy in my career.
Meeting Mr./Ms. Right. No amount of rumination can make clear which method of meeting Mr./Ms. Right is best, so the wise person takes low-risk actions, throwing a lot against the wall to see what sticks. Without undue comparing, try the online dating site you sense might be best, while cutting your losses quickly. Ask friends to set you up with someone kind, fun-loving, self-supporting, and interested in a long-term relationship. (Don't ruminate excessively to tease out other likely important factors.) Throw an party. Sign up for a course that you and an appropriate partner might like. Soon, you'll get a sense of which approach(es) is best and can drop the ineffectives or, who knows, having tried so much within a short-time frame, may meet someone and can drop all the approaches.
Investing. Rather than ruminate about all the possible investment options while leaving your money in a no-income-yielding checking or money-market account, check-out the widely praised Vanguard.
Exercise. Rather than ruminate on what form of exercise is best, for example, get a trial membership in a gym, play pick-up basketball in a local playground, and ask a friend to go for a hike. You'll soon sense what works best for you, better than if you ruminated on the options.
Where to live. Let's say you're unhappy and tempted to move to a new locale to get a fresh start where you might find more people like you. But that’s a high-risk action. Instead you might get a fresh start locally by, for example, inviting a few colleagues out to lunch, attending a Toastmasters meeting, joining a book club, and regularly perusing Meetup.org to find meetups of interest.
Writing. After just modest outlining, the productive writer begins and revises on the fly and after completing that poor first draft. You're much more likely to attain excellence incrementally than by trying to generate it in the first draft.
The takeaway
If you wanted to sail a boat from San Francisco to Hawaii, of course, you’d spend some time planning the route. But the wise sailor, when reaching planning’s point of diminishing returns, sets sail, knowing s/he can later adjust based on the winds and weather, something s/he couldn’t have accurately predicted from shore.
Even if you are striving for excellence, perfectionism à la Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Craig Venter’s decoding of the human genome, or Apple’s next iPhone, after modest reflection, it’s often wise to operate from the philosophy, “Ready, Fire, Aim.”
