I saw an interview of an businessman this week who said something to the effect of ‘educated people analyse took much and fear committing’ in the interview. He is the owner of a chips/crisps empire in India that he bootstrapped with his brother back in the 80s, and he was talking about starting a business.

If you replace the word ‘educated’ with ‘knowledgeable’, you’ll find a proverb saying the same in almost all cultures.

Wer viel weiß, zweifelt viel
_{He who knows much, doubts much}

The german phrase is sort of philosophical.

While the following spanish, chinese and japanese ones seem more critical, slightly exhortative.

El que mucho piensa, poco hace
_{He who thinks too much, does little}

想得太多，做得太少
_{Thinking too much, doing too little}

考えすぎると動けなくなる
_{If you think too much, you become unable to act}

I can relate, but not because I consider myself knowledgeable. I certainly think a lot. But perhaps I can relate more because there is an abundance or knowledge out there, and even doing a simple due-diligence or research can throw you in a rabbit hole of information.

That’s probably one of the reasons why analysis paralysis is so well known a phrase.

Wanting to start a newsletter. Analysis.
Launching the MVP of an app that will never earn anything. Analysis.
Investing in right index fund. Oh the AI bubble is about to pop. Analysis.

For someone else, it could be choosing what to study, choosing a profession, where to move to, when to marry, etc, etc.

A lot of opportunities get missed with this. As increasingly difficult as it is today, it isn’t a new thing. It has happened to humans for as long as we’ve existed.

There have been innumerable articles on how to fight/overcome this; many books, songs, and movies; all having the same message.

Just commit to the thing.

Evaluate later and adjust.

Since this is a problem for the careful anyway, people on the other side of the spectrum may not need this advice.

Therefore, if you want to go and bet thousands of euros on whether or not the deutsche bahn will run late, this advice is not for you.

For the latter group, there is the Arabic proverb

في التأني السلامة
_{In deliberation there is safety}

Interesting reads

1. Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity
   I don’t know if I can stare at walls without thinking about anything. But this seems similar to staring outside the window out-of-visual-focus that I sometimes do to improve thinking.

2. combat LLM by building a web of trust
   There has been a discourse on atmosphere about this, and I don’t know how to feel about it. I keep thinking about how people can and would try to game the system.

3. How one mural changed the way the world saw dinosaurs
   An interesting background about the mural painted on the east wall of Yale’s Peabody museum

A project I discovered

Fast displaying of maps is possible thanks to GPU-accelerated vector tile rendering

GitHub - maplibre/maplibre-gl-js: MapLibre GL JS - Interactive vector tile maps in the browser · GitHub

MapLibre GL JS - Interactive vector tile maps in the browser - maplibre/maplibre-gl-js

Not a new discovery, but I got reminded of this erstwhile fork of mapbox while looking for alternatives of mapbox this past week.

A photo I took

That’s it for the week. A short one this time. See you here soon!