Against Deliberation

Some people spend too much time thinking

Many people spend too much time deliberating via introspection.

This doesn’t mean that everyone should make decisions faster – just that we shouldn’t spend so much time thinking. 

This is what limiting deliberation looks like:

If you have a big decision. Set a timer for 5 minutes and write out all the relevant factors. Focus on the most important ones, ones which if answered, would bring you to a decision. If that feels too short, go up to an hour. After this hour, you will have a decision or a list of actions that will get you closer to making a choice. 

Once the timer goes – no more thinking, only acting.

Why does this work?

Three reasons:

1. Thought diminishes in value

2. Most information isn’t accessible from the armchair

3. We fool ourselves

Take the first point: deliberation declines in value fast. Everything has diminishing marginal returns. If you’re thinking well, the first five minutes of focused thought are more valuable per minute than the next five minutes. There’s this idea that 90% of everything is crap. Most thoughts are wrong and many are worse than wrong. A tour through the nonfiction section of any book store proves this.

Second, a priori thought will only give you so much. Most of the information isn’t even accessible to the mind alone. You won’t determine who to marry, what career to have, what restaurant to go to from the armchair. Get out of your head and into the world!

Third, thinking is contaminated. When we’re thinking alone, we’re at risk of spending our time thinking about reasons we’ll share to justify our action, not what we ought to do. We avoid facts we do not want to acknowledge. We tell ourselves narratives to stay away from hard decisions. Introspection is more like public relations than scientific inquiry. As the line goes, there are two reasons why someone does anything: the reason they give and the real reason. 

This is why it is better to have one good argument than ten. A famous philosopher of religion once gave a lecture entitled “Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for the Existence of God.” None of those arguments were compelling. They got worse as he went down the list. If any one of those arguments were any good, that would be enough!

Once you’re good at deliberating, you’ll have your most valuable armchair thoughts quickly.   They will not be in the form of two dozen complex philosophical arguments. 

The protocol I’ve seen work involves fast deliberation followed by action. The venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale wrote:

Don’t waste time talking about what you plan to think about; instead, work through it immediately.

Think, do not postpone, and then decide or seek out new information. Large decisions require more information. But the value of thought declines fast.

This process is consistent with taking years to determine answers to the questions like: what should I work on for the next decade? What it is not consistent with is:

• Thinking for longer than an hour about what the next step is

• Ruminating

• Failing to take the next step

If you’re worried that your thought is taking you astray, ask whether it gets you directly to your goal. Abstractions, narratives, and vague ‘buts’ are additional signs that deliberation is not serving its purpose. I love the slogan from Nat Friedman: slow is fake. Bureaucratic organizations get stuck in bureaucratic meetings about bureaucratic processes. Bureaucratic people get stuck in rumination.

No more words, act!