The problem is not overthinking but losing contact with reality.
Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important.
You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things.
Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole.
But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called "authority". If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program.
The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors.
Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again.
Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that.
Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth.
An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission.
If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.
I had that experience when I was a kid(of making things that mattered).
I became a cracker when I was a kid and we published how to replicate our results on the early Internet. We were the first generation that could play with computers because they were ours.
We were much better than 40 years old people(those that protected against the cracks) because they were trained in their youth with machines that were so expensive they basically could not touch. They programmed on paper.
We started our own web company early on. We were much better than the competence and it was an easy life and sold the thing at great profit. Today in this field people have 100x more skills and is rewarded way worse and it is an oligopoly of big companies.
Then I traveled the world and worked abroad. I worked in China, Japan, Korea, the US. Great opportunities that today are closed.
I used digital cameras before everybody did. Nobody uses them and suddenly, boom, everybody uses them.
My family though I was crazy for not doing what everybody else does, but turns out everybody started doing what we did first with 10 years of delay.
The last thing is working remotely. We have been doing that for a long time. It was just common sense. If you spend 2 hours commuting and are tired before working the company is wasting resources that could be channeled to create real value.
We could get people in our company so easy because they loved working on their terms and very few companies could compete with that. Those companies were like KODAK trying to do things the way they always were and it was great for us.
Now suddenly Covid happens and so many people are realizing they could work on their terms too. The mass of the people is processing and adapting to what early adopters have discovered way earlier.
Don't do that. Don't tell people too much that you love them.
Have you seen all those commercials in which they tell you how important you are for them? Then you call when you have a problem and they make you wait one hour in the phone and they don't even help you at all.
You are just idealizing what should have happened, that never happened. You are like a virgin that idealizes what a relationship is, because she never experienced one. Or an American that idealizes socialism/communism because she have never experienced anything remotely similar in reality.
When you don't know about something, you idealize it, you make it perfect, but reality is infinitely complex, and different from your ideal.
I have no problem telling people around me I love them, but that is so easy to do. It is easy to love someone on good times. There are times in which loving someone is extremely hard, like a person becoming an addict or getting in love with an addict or becoming a criminal that decides to steal or be part of a gang.
We had a family member that got in love with a heroine addict. The pain for the entire family was incredible. As this person died from overdoses we had to support the children ourselves and the problems the children had without a parent, like having sex being 13 years old and aborting.
I have been a voluntary in Africa and helped refugees. I helped drug addicts. I have seen lots of situations in which loving someone is extremely painful and they do, they don't tell, they do.
I believe in God, that it probably what makes the biggest difference in the refugees that I have interviewed in all those years.
I am Spaniard, Italy is a lovely place to live. You don't have to do any effort to see the family or friends. It is not North America or the North of Europe in which most people live much more isolated.
Crawford is not a genius, he is a visionary. He has some idea in his mind and for him this idea is as real as reality. But it does not.
The early successes he had made him overconfident. I don't see the formulas he displays as anything sort of revolutionary.
Any computer game today have systems way more sophisticated than that, or even old systems like the "sims" engine(original CimCity, Spore), Civilization series, doom, mafia, a flight simulator or Age of Empires to name a few. All those systems have incredible internal mathematical models.
He risked anything he had on his vision. His vision came sort. He does not accept reality. Even today he believes his visions are right and the world is wrong.
The "I blew it" is not acceptance of his failures. It is an acceptance of the failures of society that was not prepared for his revolutionary ideas. Society was not yet prepared for his genius. He made the mistake of valuing society more than what is worth.
Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important.
You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things.
Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole.
But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called "authority". If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program.
The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors.
Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again.
Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that.
Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth.
An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission.
If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.