Happy Free Thoughts Thursday, people.

Quick life hack for you: download Instapaper.

It lets you save articles you want to read but don't have time for at the moment and its interface is 100x nicer to read on than whichever website published the article. Plus, it doesn't show ads.

It has a website & browser extension for your laptop and an app for your phone. Super convenient.

Now let's talk about thinking vs. doing.

1 Thought From Me:

“There is an inverse relationship between things on your mind and those things getting done.” — David Allen

I'm a deep thinker. And not just in the "what is the meaning of life" or "what drives human behavior" kinda ways... but in many kind of ways.

I can read a quote and then think about how it applies to my life or the world at large for way longer than I'd like to admit.

I genuinely enjoy exploring different topics in my head and thinking about the consequences of new information I learn.

The other day I joked with my brother that my mind is so busy even solitary confinement couldn't drive me to boredom. I was mostly kidding.

There are a lot of benefits to being a deep thinker.

It allows us to see the world from various perspectives, to formulate our own opinions and to find creative solutions to problems.

I even made a video about how boredom (being alone with our thoughts) can be a superpower and I stand by that claim.

But there are also a lot of drawbacks to being a deep thinker.

It can cause us to overthink even the simplest of ideas, to get hung up on our own beliefs and to find it hard to connect with others.

Like the list of pros, the list of cons to being a deep thinker extends far beyond the three mentioned above.

But there's one con in particular that we may never notice despite its incessant obstruction of our ability to get things done, and that is a deep thinker's tendency to value thoughts over action.

The reason we may never notice this drawback without someone calling it to our attention is because thinking deeply often feels productive. We make progress on an idea so it feels like we're moving forward.

And a lot of the time we are. Thinking is absolutely critical to understanding and solving problems—both internally and externally.

But just like reading a book is useless if we don't implement its ideas into our life, thinking deeply gets us nowhere if we don't apply our understanding and solutions to our own situation.

And truthfully, the application is the hardest part.

It's easy to think about what it takes to be a great friend, partner or employee but actually being those things is hard.

It's easy to imagine what it will take to live our ideal life, but actually living that life is hard.

It's easy to lay out the steps to build a successful business, but actually building that business is hard.

"Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world." — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The good news is you might not be able to teach someone how to be a deep thinker but you can certainly teach them the importance of taking action.

Here's what we need to understand: the more time we spend thinking about our goals the less time we spend working towards them, and it's the working towards them that will bring us closer to where we want to be.

Once we understand that then we can consciously place at least the same value on our actions as we do on our thoughts.

And if we apply those new values we should start to make the same meaningful progress in the real world as we do in our head.

“Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.” — Allen Saunders

Let's not get so caught up in thinking about life that we forget to actually live it.

Live your life to the fullest,

Chris

P.S. Find this interesting it? Please share it with others!

Watch my videos on YouTube