Moving From Thought to Execution Faster: a mix of intuition and awareness of fallacies

I want to get better at moving from thought to action faster, and go straight to execution.

How? By acting from intuition rather than mental reflection.

The knowledge you have acquired from your series of experiences has compounded into your intuition. Your intuition is like your computer storage and operating system that runs in the background without you having to intervene and tell it what to do. It compiles code, stores data, and allocates computing resources - automatically. These programs are “innate” to the computer, and are subconsciously operated by the machine.

We have the equivalent programs within us, and that is our intuition. Our intuition knows how to run programs and allocate resources using the data it has to work with. We collect data constantly through our environment, and our intuition takes it in through a variety of subconscious processes encoded in our biology. 

The problem is that unlike computers that just default to its native backend processing program (or intuition), human cognition gives us an additional path of data processing (mental reflection).

The reason why it is relevant in the context of thinking about how to move faster to execution is that acting from intuition is faster than acting from reflection. 

Reflection is the step before something gets encoded in your intuition, but once it is encoded, your intuition has the data and reasoning pathways already programmed to act - yet we (or I) rarely fully trust it.

Speaking for myself - I tend to default to thoughts more than intuition to guide me towards action. This pattern is most likely explained by the illusion that giving something more thought will reduce uncertainty, and that with more certainty, I can gain the confidence I need to move towards action. While not entirely false, the extent to which “confidence” is “enough” to move forward is not clear. There is always more to learn, more to know, and more to reflect on.

The degree of confidence keeps increasing, but its marginal utility (in the context of getting the thing done) does not.

What I found most useful to realise is: I will not, and cannot know everything. Once I accept this, I can move faster from thought to action. Through action, I gain experience, and through experience, I gain knowledge. 

What is most important is therefore not the knowledge we need to act, but the knowledge we gain through action. (experiential knowledge trumps intellectual knowledge, almost every time)

Learning to trust what we know implicitly vs what we reflect on explicitly is a practice. We have to trust that what our intuition tells us, while unquantifiable, is still validated from encoded knowledge from years of compounding data and experience.

Mental reflection remains useful, but following intuition is more efficient, and that is what I want to do more of in 2024.

Another compounding factor:

There might be another reason why I default to thought more than action:

Thinking is (or seems to be) more fun.

Thinking is fun because it is boundless. When I think, I have no constraints. I can think whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want, at the speed I want. No matter where my thoughts go, my thoughts are free of consequences. Conversely, action is bound with constraints, and have real consequences. It is therefore much easier to just think than act. 

The place where it goes wrong is when I start to conflate moving forward in thought rather than in real life. I progress faster through thought than action, and indulge in that speed. As someone who has a lot going on up there (in my mind), I sometimes feel like the world around me is too slow, and end up preferring the internal pace of living rather than adjusting to the reality that is externally manifested.

I am frustrated (and sometimes overcome/beat) at times by the velocity of my ideas that outpace the rate of possible execution. I do not want to slow my thoughts down because ideas and reflections give me energy, yet I know that unless I accept to take a pause, I will not be able to move forward significantly (and with full force) towards them.

I have to find my happy balance: where I can still welcome thoughts, while making my thoughts productive through action. The solution might be setting up systems, programs, or surrounding myself with the right people and tools to complete me.

I will always be an idea generation machine, and don’t want to change that - but hopefully I can learn to turn up my execution machine in parallel.