Flip the Switch: Kill Overthinking and Ship It

Overthinking is just fear. It's wearing a lab coat pretending to be a strategy, right? It feels real smart. It looks real sharp. But at the end of the day, it's really just theft. And it's stealing your hours, it's stealing your energy, it's steering your, you know, stealing your progress moving forward, your momentum. So today we're going to flip the effort, switch on overthinking, and get things started, right? So, look, this is one of those things where every day I have these conversations with people. This is probably one of the most commonly had conversations in my week, where consultants, business owners, what have you, they're losing weeks at a time trying to decide on little things, stupid things, things that, when you look back at it, in hindsight, mean next to nothing. A great example. Should your new course be $997, $995 or $999? Which one sounds better, Steve? And then maybe they go on a Facebook group and run a poll. They check their spreadsheets of the things they've bought. They lose sleep over this. Two bucks, three bucks, four bucks, five bucks, whatever it might be, you know, from 9.95 to 9.99, that's a $4 spread. And they're gonna spend weeks deciding. And I get that there's been data over the years of scientific value, of emotional triggers, yada, yada, yada, but at the end of the day, if you're spending weeks to decide or even days to decide over a $4 difference, you're failing yourself in the first place. You're overthinking this beyond a rational order. And at the end of the day, the person that's buying your course, they don't give a shit about $2. If they're willing to spend a grand, they're willing to spend a grand. It's not going to make a difference. Nobody's going to be like, well, man, if only it was 997, because 999 is just too darn much. That never happens. Nobody's saying no because of a buck or two. So at the end of the day, what's happening is you're not even strategizing anymore, right? You think you're strategizing, going, oh, well, what's the better number? Nope, you're just hiding, right? You're hiding from shipping it out. You're hiding from going public. You're hiding from. From announcing it on. On your. Your socials, you know, and making a PR piece about it. You're Just hiding from shipping at the end of the day. So when you're overthinking, you know it only. The whole concept of overthinking only survives when you believe one wrong move is going to kill you. So if you live day to day where you, you have fear that that one thing is going to completely wreck your day, your hour, your, you know, your structures, your socials, your whatever, it really doesn't make a difference. If you truly believe one wrong move is going to kill you. Well, overthinking's already crushing you, right? So unless you're diffusing bombs, nothing deciding that you're deciding today is really fatal, right? If you're working for the bomb department, don't listen to me, just go, just be reactionary, get it done. Save the world, man, you're a hero. Thank you. Like that's it. But nothing. You're deciding today for the price of your course or the price of your consultancy or your product, or how you're going to name your podcast or whatever it's going to be, it's not fatal. You can get over it, you can get beyond it. So stop overthinking it and let's just do something like, look, I believe in having a lot of mini rules in my day and it's not that I'm a structured person, because I'm probably not, but overall I do little things that get me out of funks and get me out of drifting away. And one of these would be just having a simple 10 second rule. So if you've got a minor decision, like you're posting some copy, maybe an email subject, I don't know, it could be anything. It could be the pricing ending in 5, 7 or 9. If you already know the answer to what that decision is, just go ahead and do it. Stop screwing around, stop thinking of reasons why you can't. Every time you think of another reason why you can't, you are literally overthinking and putting up your own roadblocks against yourself. You are becoming your own worst enemy. So if you know the answer, just do it and move on. If you don't know the answer, count down from 10, right? That's why it's a 10 second rule. Count yourself back from 10. Breathe. Go outside and breathe for a minute. Open a window and get some fresh air. Do something to reset your mind. And look, it all comes back to rise, right? I'm not even talking about rise right now. We're just talking about overthinking. But it's still, still roots itself. Back into that R the reset. Count yourself back from 10 and then pick the simplest option when you get to one and go for it. Just ship that, right? I like to say ship it a lot because to me, that's. It's also code thing, software thing, where you used to ship it when it was ready. But no, just. Or send it. You could say, send it, whatever works for you. Count yourself down from 10 to 1 and just make that action. Take that small simplest option and run with it immediately. The market is gonna tell you faster than your brain ever will. So once you put things out there and people start seeing what you're doing and they know what you're all about, the market will tell you whether or not that seven, five or nine worked. It will tell you whether or not that post landed or if that post didn't land. Little details, things like growth, web traffic, social traffic, social connections, you know, social comments and likes and all those little indicators that, look, we're not looking to get viral. We're not looking to be, quote, unquote, famous. You're only looking for those exact people. So your numbers may be starkly lower than the person that's selling something like T shirts or somebody selling music. For any bands that are out there that are pushing their bands on the Internet and they're trying to get seen on Instagram and they're trying to get seen on Spotify and all these places, they have different metrics. It's not the same for the typical business owners that I typically see and speak to and stuff like that. So just count down to 10 and send it right? Let the market decide and think about it. When it's a bigger decision, well, then you could ask yourself questions on bigger decisions, like, what would I do if I didn't care about looking stupid? I know that sounds crazy, right? Like, what would I do if I don't care? If I didn't care about looking like a fool, if I didn't care about looking stupid, well, who cares? Like, your audience is going to connect to you either way once they find you. So if you're doing something that feels a little out of your normal pocket, maybe that's what's gonna reach your audience. On the other side, you could argue and triple down saying, I'm gonna be distinctly me every single time, good, bad or indifferent. And that's gonna attract the right people anyway. It's kind of what I do. And it's, you know, at the end of the day, we all worry about looking stupid. We all worry about feeling stupid. We all think about things when we put it out to the Internet. I can sit here and listen to every single one of these episodes I've been recording. I think we're on episode 15, right? I could pick each one apart. I could sit there with my headphones on and sit there in Persona Studio 1 and Audio Edit myself to hell and back. I could remove every, you know, every. Every. Every whatever. I could overthink every single one of these episodes into the freaking salt of the earth. But I won't, because I've flipped that switch and I've refused to allow myself to do that. I'm refusing to stay stuck, right? So today's riff, we're calling them riff of the days, by the way. So it's just gonna be the riff of the day. Overthinking is just fear with a spreadsheet. Flip that switch or stay stuck. And just so you guys know, the majority of these things, I use bullet notes, and then I just kind of go from there. The one thing I do write is, like a title, a purpose, and then the riff of the day, I actually write that riff down because I'm stockpiling all the riffs in a totally separate thing that I'll use down the road. Maybe I'll use it for graphics, whatever. But that all comes to being able to reuse your own content. And we'll talk about stuff like that down the road. I've got a book that's coming out next year that's going to be the marketing side of the action, the actions that we take from all these conversations. I'm helping you get unstuck right now. That's my goal, hopefully. And hopefully that's working. But at the end of the day, you're going to need some directions and instructions, and that's what the book's all about. And we'll talk more about that in the future. So let's wrap this one up right now. Overthinking, it dies in the daylight, right? It's like a vampire. It can't see the light. Think of overthinking like a vampire. You push it out into the daylight, you let it get some sun on it, and it wilts away. It makes the overthinking go away, and that feeling goes away. Bring your spirals down. Like when you get spiraled out. Go talk to somebody. Go do a move that makes you break that habit. Go talk, go online. You could go into the community. You can go wherever you want. And, you know, I'll be the first one to dare you to hit send, and that's that. Stop overthinking, guys. It's gonna crush you every single day. It's one of the hugest things I love to talk about because it stops everything. So with that in mind, stop overthinking. Have an amazing day. Thank you, as always, for being here. I truly appreciate you. I'm Steve Lichtman, and this was another episode of Unfiltered and Unshakable.