Paralysis by Analysis, Pivoting, and the Problem of Other People
I’ve Been AWOL
I’ve been a bit AWOL recently.
Not because anything has gone wrong, quite the opposite. Work has exploded in the best possible way. Projects stacking up, systems needing attention, clients needing things built. It’s the kind of busy every founder says they want until it actually arrives.
Add university on top of that this weekend and the whole thing becomes slightly absurd. But that’s life. It rarely asks whether your calendar agrees.
What’s been more interesting than the workload, though, is what’s been happening around it. A few things recently have forced me to stop and look at something I’ve never been particularly good at thinking about.
Not strategy.
Not systems.
People.
More specifically, the uncomfortable reality that not everyone processes the world the way I do.
And that has been… interesting.
My Brain Moves First
My brain has always been wired in a very particular way when it comes to problems.
When something appears that needs solving, my instinct is to move immediately. I don’t enjoy sitting around mapping every possible outcome before taking the first step. I don’t enjoy analysing a situation to death before anything happens. My dad calls that paralysis by analysis, and for most of my life I’ve had very little patience for it.
If something needs doing, do it. If something breaks along the way, deal with it then. If the direction turns out to be wrong, pivot and keep going.
That mindset has shaped almost everything about how I operate. It’s probably a big part of why I run a business in the first place.
Why That Works in Business
Business is essentially an endless sequence of problems.
Something breaks. Something needs rebuilding. Something needs adjusting. Something needs launching. Waiting for perfect clarity before moving usually means you never move at all.
So I developed a habit early on: pick a direction and start building.
Most of the time that approach works. Movement creates information. When you build something, test something, launch something, you suddenly have feedback that endless thinking would never have produced. You can see what works, what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly.
But moving quickly also comes with a cost.
When you prioritise action, you sometimes skip planning that would have saved you time later. You occasionally create new problems while solving the current one. Speed is powerful, but it also introduces chaos.
Learning to Plan (A Little)
Over the last few years I’ve slowly been learning to balance that instinct a bit better, especially with client projects.
Instead of jumping straight into building something, I’ve started mapping things out properly first, what the actual problem is, what the client brief really means, what the likely solution might look like, and what the boundaries of the project are.
Interestingly, AI has helped with that process more than anything else.
Not because it magically produces solutions, but because it helps organise messy thinking. I can dump a rough concept onto paper, outline the problem in a fairly unstructured way, and then refine it into something that actually makes sense to someone else.
That document becomes the anchor for the project. It clarifies scope. It clarifies expectations. It gives both sides something concrete to reference when the inevitable questions start appearing.
That process has taken me years to get comfortable with, but it’s made projects run far more smoothly.
I Used to Be the Opposite
Even with that improvement, though, my natural instinct is still to move quickly.
And the reason for that is actually tied to a very different period of my life.
I used to be the opposite.
There was a time where I tried to plan everything. Not just work, but life itself. I tried to map the future as if it were a strategy document. Where I’d live, what my life would look like, how things would unfold.
Every detail felt like something that needed to be decided ahead of time.
None of those plans played out the way I imagined.
Because life doesn’t follow your spreadsheet.
Life Doesn’t Follow the Plan
People change.
Circumstances change.
Opportunities appear without warning and disappear just as quickly.
Health, money, relationships, direction, everything shifts constantly. Trying to plan every detail of the future turned out to be less about control and more about feeding anxiety when reality inevitably refused to cooperate.
Once I realised that, I think my mindset flipped completely.
Instead of trying to control everything, I started focusing on adaptability.
The Pivot Mindset
If something changes, pivot.
If a plan stops making sense, pivot again.
Build something, see what happens, and adjust.
That pivot mindset has served me well in a world that rarely behaves predictably.
But it also created a different challenge, one I’m only now properly noticing.
The Real Problem Isn’t Speed
The challenge isn’t speed itself.
The challenge is expecting everyone else to operate at that speed.
My brain tends to process things in a very direct sequence: understand the problem, decide on a direction, and move. Once the direction is clear, the next step feels obvious.
But many people don’t process the world like that.
Some people need time to think things through before committing to anything. Some people need to ask questions immediately. Some people need emotional clarity before practical clarity.
Their brains don’t move from problem to action in the same way mine does.
And that isn’t wrong.
The Lesson I’m Sitting In
So the lesson I’m sitting in right now is not about becoming slower or abandoning the instincts that have helped me build things.
It’s about learning how to deal with people who process things differently without becoming impatient or dismissive.
That requires something that doesn’t come naturally to someone wired for action.
Patience.
It requires understanding that urgency feels different depending on how someone’s brain works. It requires answering questions without assuming the person asking them is being difficult.
And sometimes it requires slowing down enough to let someone else process something before expecting movement.
Code Is Easier Than People
The uncomfortable truth is that code is easier than people.
Systems behave logically. Problems can usually be debugged. You apply the right fix and things move forward.
People don’t work like that.
They’re complex, emotional, unpredictable, thoughtful, cautious, reactive, often all at the same time.
Which means the real skill isn’t just building things quickly.
It’s learning how to navigate those differences without leaving unnecessary damage behind.
That’s the thing I’m working on now.
A Small Side Note
So that’s the lesson I’m sitting in right now.
Not how to move faster. I already know how to do that. Not how to build better systems. That part of life is almost easy.
The harder lesson is learning how to move through the world without assuming everyone else should move the way I do.
Because people process things differently. They need different amounts of certainty. Different amounts of time. Different ways of arriving at decisions.
And if you’re someone whose instinct is to jump first and figure it out on the way down, learning to live with that difference is real work.
It’s probably more important work than any system I’ll ever build.
Also, as a side note, yes, I am trying to write more articles. Work has been absolutely relentless lately, which means Brainwaves has been a bit quieter on my end.
In the meantime you’ll probably see more of Dad’s articles.
Which is fine.
He also manages to outperform my writing every single time he publishes something, which is both impressive and mildly irritating, (I joke I’m really proud of him).
Good times.