Deep Thinking vs Overthinking
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Yurui’s Summary
Instant gratification leads to comfort, the enemy of ambition. It leads to shallow thinking.
There’s a fine line between overthinking vs deep thinking. Thinking deeper often comes with the side effect of overthinking.
Deep thinking has a positive effect on you as a person: especially how much you understand the circumstances of a situation, whereas overthinking often involves useless, rambling tangents of thoughts; thinking too much about something in an unproductive way.
When you live life, think deeply, and be intentional with what you do everyday. Sometimes, though, you just can’t afford to give a fuck and instead, it’s better to not dwell on it. You just gotta let it go.
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I was at a Prefect Afternoon Tea a few days ago when I caught up with one of my primary school friends from nearly 10 years ago. We had met around half a year ago at the UBS Finance Academy, but didn’t really get that much time to chat. He came up to me and said that he loved reading my blog, and asked how long it took me to create it, because it seemed like I spent hours on these ‘well thought out’ articles; I said that it took 2 weeks to set up and maybe 20-30 minutes to write up each article. Reality is that I spend hours every week journaling, meditating, and at the gym, thinking about my life and what I’ve learnt throughout the day. All the content I think of is recorded into a nice and simple Word document - my journal. All I do on my blog is extract the best parts, and summarise it in a more readable way.
After meeting me at UBS and hearing about how I process my learning, he said that he noticed that I seemed a lot more introverted, but also knew how to enjoy myself when I wanted to. I couldn’t have described the change in my personality over the past few months any better myself, as I’ve become so much more quiet through learning to focus on myself, and not care excessively for the words of others.
I think that I’ve really prioritised deeper thinking recently. Journaling, meditating, and going to the gym has given way to deeper thinking, which is what I believe teenagers in society lack. Instant gratification leads to comfort - the enemy of ambition, which leads to shallow thinking.
I’ve become more mindful with how I’m living life. I mean this in respect to how I set my personal goals, what I want my life to be like in the future, and how I can be better today than I was yesterday.
That noted, there’s definitely a really fine line between overthinking vs deep thinking. Thinking deeper often comes with the side effect of overthinking. Deep thinking has a positive effect on you as a person: especially how much you understand the circumstances of a situation, whereas overthinking often involves useless, rambling tangents of thoughts, and (in my case at least) thinking too much about something.
On the outside, I seem like the most relaxed, chill, and happy guy (and apparently charismatic???). But on the inside (or recently, at least), I’ve honestly been quite a chronic overthinker. When I come across hardship and tough decisions in life, I’ve tried to embrace deeper thinking instead. Often, when I leave my thoughts unattended, I ironically tend to overthink tremendously and mentally end up in a terrible downward spiral.
So my takeaway is this: When you live your life, think deeply, and be intentional with what you do everyday. Do this through the means that work best for you; journaling, meditating, and working out clicked best with me. Sometimes, though, you just can’t afford to give a fuck and instead, it’s better to not dwell on it. You just gotta let it go.
Yurui
