#89: How Analysis Paralysis Can Cost You–in More Ways Than One

Foreign. Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. Hey everyone, welcome back. Happy New Year. To those of you listening to this, at the beginning of the new year, we all know that everyone, well, not everyone, millions of people all over the world are starting to set or have set New Year's resolutions. I know that people think, you know, they kind of go one way or the other about New Year's resolutions, whether you should do them or not or set goals. I always think it's a great idea. It's the beginning of a new year. It's a great marker for something like fresh, right? It's an opportunity to clean the palette and start something new. So I think it's a great thing to do. Set some resolutions. Unfortunately, many of the people, you know, who set resolutions at the beginning of the year, they're not going to be sticking with it. Right. I'm not talking about people listening to this. Right. But I'm sure you've heard the statistics. Most Americans, most people out there, they're already, by February 1st, they've already abandoned their goals altogether. Now, people definitely cite different reasons for why they give up on the resolutions. Maybe it's just a lack of self discipline or, or maybe for certain resolutions, they thought it would take less time or they don't have the time for it, or maybe they just didn't set effective goals. And we talked about how to set effective goals that are, you know, clear in terms of what they're trying to accomplish, you know, setting deadlines and understanding what they are. And I think that's a big part of it. But another reason that I think is pretty often overlooked, it's one that I've personally experienced so many times, especially when setting some more of these ambitious type goals. And it's that whole concept of paralysis by analysis or analysis paralysis, however you want to say it. You've probably heard this term before, but even if you haven't, you likely know what it feels like, right? Exactly what it feels like when I say it. You know, sometimes there are so many options out there, so many different paths to take that we feel overwhelmed and frozen in place. And we want to be perfect, right? We wanna make sure everything works amazingly so we don't even get started. Now, I've been through this so many times, you know, I've set these lofty goals for the future or like, let's say even for the year. And I know that there's so many different ways to get there and like, I don't know which one's the best, right? And so at worst, I will say you, I will tell you that this line of thinking or this line of thought, it can keep us from even getting started. So whether it's a new investment, a goal for passive income streams, or even just getting into shape, for example, there are some ways that analysis paralysis can affect you and how you can overcome it. We're going to talk about that for good now. I want to start by saying right off the bat, too much analysis, it can actually reduce productivity. You know, that feeling of having so many choices and not knowing which one to take can really affect your ability to make a decision and get things done, right? Think back to a time when you had to write a lengthy paper for school. It might been a long time since any you picked up a pen and done any actual writing or at least typing, right? You know, back in the day, you open up a blank page, like in a notebook, or pulled it out, you have a pencil or keyboard ready to go, and then you probably sat there for a while, right? Sat there for so many minutes, no idea where to start. And if you're like me at all, you probably gave up after a little while and you, maybe you came back to it when you were closer to the deadline, right? When you had to get it done. I mean, I think that's a great example of paralysis by analysis. I mean, the thing is like, you know, you are thinking about so many different ways to do it, how to get started, you know, and then you actually don't get started, right? The truth is, once you actually got started, you made that, you know, that first sentence or whatever. Like things probably flowed much quicker and before you knew it, it was done, or at least that first draft. And then you could course correct and figure it out and then it would automatically get done a lot quicker. You know, I also see that when people are trying to start investing, let's say this is a new year, you want to start creating passive income streams or they want to, you want to try to get started. You're thinking, which way I go? Like, should I buy a rental property? Should I invest in a passive real estate deal like a syndication or fund or a REIT? Should I do it in stocks, mutual funds, crypto, NFTs? I mean, there's just so many ways now and so Many different choices that people sit there frozen. And so what happens, you start to analyze each one of these routes and you don't know which one is the best. And you start listening to so many different people, talking to so many different people, and you're analyzing the pros and the cons and you know, you actually just get stuck, right? As physicians, we're always trying to make the correct evidence based decision. It's what we do. You know, we often look for multiple confirmatory studies or signs. We get that high degree of confidence before making a move. Unfortunately, the rest of the world, it doesn't really work that way. You're not always going to get all the data you need to make the right decision. So that feeling of being overwhelmed by choice, having all these different options, not knowing which way to go, it makes it really difficult to focus on whatever the task is at hand. The key is to recognize when this is happening and so not get stuck and bogged down in that task and realizing that you can't and maybe shouldn't overthink it. Now what I think is that one of the greatest issues with sitting there in analysis, paralysis is what it can cost you. Now, too often we spend so much time wondering what would happen if, if we fail, right? If we try something, you know, we try, we think of all the crazy negative consequences, but we also don't think about, you know, what if we don't take that action at all, right? What if we also tried and actually succeeded? Why don't we spend time thinking about that too, right? The benefit of it and on the other side, like, where would we be? Now these are all kind of questions that we should be thinking about. Which force us to weigh what, you know, others have called, and I love using this phrase, the cost of inaction, right? Don't always think about like what might happen to you if you fall. I mean, I think it's important to talk about that or at least think about it, but also think about what you'll lose by not taking action. You know, unfortunately, as humans, like just a natural thing for us, we spend a lot of time thinking about the what ifs. I mean, really, this boils down to fear, right? The fear of making mistakes, of looking foolish, falling flat on our faces and failing. You know, the key here is to look at those mistakes. I guess that's like learning experiences, right? Those stepping stones on the way to success. I mean, everyone knows that, you know, any successful person, there's no way they made it there without having some detours, right? Falling down learning from those experiences. And when you get into it and you talk to a lot of these entrepreneurs, like we've done so many times, not only in this podcast, but we've talked about, you know, on the Leveraging Growth Summit and things like that, every one of them are, you know, they'll be happy to share their mistakes. And they talk about it almost as a sense of pride because they know that without those mistakes, they wouldn't have gotten where they're at today. And then, you know, if you start to recognize that and you see these things as learning experiences or, you know, falling forward type moments, then maybe they won't seem so scary. Now, personally, I made ton of mistakes on the way, and I've learned from each one. I mean, some of them hurt more than others. But when I look back, I look at a lot of those mistakes and I realize, or those learning, you know, those learning moments, like, oh, my gosh, they actually allowed me to do some of the things later on that I did today, right? To have some of the successes, because all those failures led me up to where I am now and all those learning points, and I'm always getting better and I'm still making mistakes, trust me, making investments where. And I'm learning through each one of those. But I know it's gonna help equip me for a better win down the line. I say, the only true mistake that you can make is waiting too long to get started. You know, this whole cost of inaction thing, just to give you another example of it, I know that many people sit there and they say, all right, well, if I try something new to create new income streams, or I try real estate investing in five years, well, I could lose some money. And they worry about that. Now I tell them, where would you be in five years if you didn't take action? And many of them will say, well, I'm probably in a worse place than I am today, you know, because a lot of us, I think we agree that medicine in five years, 10 years will probably be either the same or in a worse place for us, right? The people that are listening to this. And unfortunately, that's to be the case when it comes to things like financially or having control over our lives and our careers. I don't know, maybe I don't think optimistically when it comes to medicine, that in five, 10 years it'll be a better place for us as doctors. And so if you don't take action and you just kind of stay the status quo, like, what are you doing to prepare yourself for that five or ten years. Are you putting yourself in a worse position? Are you guaranteeing yourself a worse position by doing nothing? So that's kind of part of the whole reasoning and thinking about cost, you know, taking the cost of inaction into account, because it helps you kind of frame, you know, how important it is to actually try to take steps, to take risks and make things happen. So how can you avoid analysis process and actually achieve the goals you set for yourself? Well, the most important step, actually is to set those goals in the first place. Now, we talked about in previous podcasts how to set these smart goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and what they call time bound, you know, so it changes some of your goals from like, let's just say get in shape. I mean, that kind of goal is, of course, it's a good goal to have, but how can you measure that, right? How specific is that and how likely are you to. To actually achieve that? Now, what if that became, instead of saying get in shape, becomes like, you know, I really want to lose 10 pounds by March 31st at a rate of 1 pound per week or something like that. Again, it's not all about losing weight and that sort of thing, but it's just like setting specific goals. Like, when it comes to passive income, it might be something like, hey, I want to create a thousand dollars of passive income a month by three months from now, and setting a date for that. And this is how I'm going to achieve that. Specifically, it's taking basically a large, vague goal and then breaking up into smaller, specific, actionable steps. And I think that's something that's needed to help us really achieve these goals and make sure we're stepping in the right direction. I mean, not only will it help you stick to your main goal overall, but you're going to also have these really, you know, these sub goals, these smarter, you know, several. These smaller sub goals to keep you motivated in the short. It allows you to kind of knock these things down one by one to track your progress and make you feel like you're actually getting closer to where you want to be. Then once you've done this, you created these goals, created these smaller checkpoints. There's really only one thing left to do, ultimately, the one step that you have to do. And it sounds so simple, but it's to just start right? It doesn't matter what resolution you set or even if you set one at all. Like, I think the thing that helps is to envision your ideal life Right. Set your ideal life. What would it look like to be there? How would it feel to get where you're at and then just to start working toward them, whatever that is. Right? Set aside the fear of failure. Make informed decisions. You don't want to just take unnecessary risk, but don't get so caught up in analyzing everything that you fail to act. And I know we've all done this before. I've done it so many times. And so I just have to catch myself in that moment and say, let me just take a step or two. I'm not going to accomplish everything tomorrow, but a step or two in the right direction. Like, even if you're not sure that that step is the right path to take and you're not 100% sure, trust me, you're going to course correct over time. Like we've talked about it, and somebody gave me this analogy in the past, is that when, you know, you're taking a flight from wherever you're at, you know, to, let's say, to Hawaii, for example, like, you know, you look at the flight chart and that sort of thing on the, on the little console in front of you, it looks like a straight line, but if you actually really zoom down on that, is that it's never a straight line. It's actually kind of a jagged path that takes into account wind changes and things like that. And even though it, like from the, you know, wide overview or at the end of it, it looks like you went a straight line, but honestly, the plane was course correcting the entire time, right? So rest assured that as things change, you know, we are resourceful people. You know, we're going to learn new information, we're going to adjust accordingly, and that's what we've done for everything right in our lives. So as we enter this new year, we're here, you know, take that first step, whatever that is, make that investment, enroll in a course, show up, talk to someone who's done it before, find a mentor, ask questions, whatever it is. Like, start even before you feel ready. Because once you just start on the path, I promise you, you're going to look back and say, hey, I hit my goal, or I at least made tremendous progress. You're going to look back and be grateful that, you know, even if you didn't know all the information, the ins and outs, you, you didn't wait. Because that tends to be like the number one regret of people. When I talk to them about, you know, where they're at today, I'm like, well, do you have any regrets. And you know, people don't love to live with regrets, but a lot of them honestly say I wish I had started sooner. So hopefully that won't be you looking back. You know, make this your best year yet. Whatever I can do to support you, help you on this journey, feel free to reach out again. I'm super grateful for this community. Thanks for letting me be a part of your life and let's talk again soon. Thanks everyone. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you a part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group PassiveIncome. Docs and you can always learn more at our website, passiveincomemd. Com. Thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.