When should you be thinking and when should you be acting?
Ok let’s say you are trying to decide on how to market a product that you have. You could sit and think of the best way to market it or you could just pick an action and execute:
If the expected value of your extra thinking is higher than the expected value of taking action, you should sit and think.
If you think that by sitting and thinking of better video ideas—more viral, more engaging, more entertaining—will lead to a much higher expected value than taking instant action, you should sit and think.
A great video can be 10×–100× more valuable than a good video, so generally it’s worth investing the time to possibly come up with that great idea instead of just taking action and creating a merely good video.
However, there are things where you literally can’t just sit and think. For example, if you were trying to learn swimming, it’s probably not a good idea to just sit there and think about swimming. Just get in the water and swim!
Another way to think about it: if the information you produce by thinking is more valuable than the sum of the value of the action and the information it produces, then you should sit and think.
valueInformationThinking > valueOfAction + valueInformationAction:
think()
else:
action()