Overthinking
I'm doing my best, ok?
I’ve had nearly the same conversation with 4-5 different people over the last ten days or so. The conversation goes like this.
Other: How do you think about X? [The question is golf related.]
Me: I need to improve X. And I think that my deficiencies in X are due to Y. So I’m working on Y to get better at X.
Other: What about Z?
Me: Well, that’s related, but not quite the same thing. You’d think that would fix X, but really it’s another symptom of Y. So I’m focusing on Y, and in the process I’ll improve both X and Z.
Other: I really think you can just Z.
Me: [At this point, I give my best breakdown of X, Y, and Z, trying to outline the whole interrelation as comprehensively as I can. This takes roughly 3-5 minutes, or until the other person gets frustrated or loses interest, at which point they say—
Other: I think you’re overthinking this.
It’s not always “I think you’re overthinking this” — sometimes it’s “you’re overthinking this,” without the “I think qualifier.” Sometimes there’s a “by a lot” or similar. But somewhere in that response are the three words: “you’re overthinking this.”
Maybe you’ve had a conversation like this with me recently. Don’t worry; I’m not talking about you, I’m only talking about the other conversations. You’re cool. It’s everyone else.
I’ve been enjoying the first week-and-a-half of Yankees baseball. During that time-span, he’s hitting below the Mendoza Line and getting on base at a sub-.250 clip. Prior to the season, he declared that his goal was a 50-50 season — 50 homers and 50 stolen bases, something that’s only been once in MLB history, by the best player who’s ever lived. Jazz has only hit more than 30 homers in a season once.
I’m a big fan on Jazz Chisholm. I think he’s very good ballplayer who’s unfairly cast as overrated while being a top-10 second baseman. But I’ve watched him play enough baseball to know what I want to see from him: Jazz is fast and athletic, the Yankees have plenty of aging slug on the roster, and I want him to be a contact-first bat. I want him to get on base. The best I’ve seen him hit is when he’s making disciplined swings at good pitches. The worst I’ve seen him hit is when he’s obviously trying to pull balls to the short porch.
So, as a moderately-active New York Yankees fan, I consider myself having an informed opinion of what I want to see from Jazz Chisholm. Hearing him say he’s trying to hit 50 homers scares me, because I think that’s the wrong thing to do — I think he should have a contact-first hitting approach. I feel pretty strongly about this.
The New York Yankees are a nine-billion-dollar franchise making $750-million-plus in annual revenue. By my best estimate, there are between fifty and a hundred people whose entire job is to figure out ways to win on the field, and that includes helping Jazz Chisholm hit. There are guys with math PhDs on staff pouring over analytics that are incomprehensible to me — as in, I literally could not comprehend them. All of these very smart people are paid good money to work as cogs in a machine that tries very hard to find razor-thin edges that might result in the single run over 162 games that wins a pennant.
I think about what would happen if I walked into the Yankees analytics department and started asking about Jazz’s approach. I’d assume that they’d tell me about a minute tweak they’re making to his bat path that will help him against certain breaking pitches, such that the opposing pitchers throw him more fastballs, such that his swing decisions are simplified enough to get his A-swing off a couple percent of the time more, such that his exit velocity numbers go up, such that his OBP and SLUG increase simultaneously, such that….
If I responded, “yeah, but I keep seeing him swing too hard and strike out, so I think you guys are overthinking all this,” then I imagine I’d be like that guy with the big sword in Raiders of the Lost Ark: I’d be shot dead with dismissive contempt while the team went back to things far more important than dealing with me.
(Author’s Note: if any of this sounds dismissive or rude, give me about 3-4 more paragraphs and then the whole tone shifts a good bit.)
I have a friend who’s a hedge-fund trader. You might be aware that most NBA players wish they were rappers and most rappers wish they played in the League — there’s an identical phenomenon by which finance guys wish they played golf and golfers are fascinated by finance. And so, once in a while, I’ll have him walk me through the high-level thinking behind how he trades a certain news event. He’ll tell me about how an event in one part of the world has a nearly direct effect on a seemingly-unrelated supply chain on the other side of the globe. He sits around thinking about these things, build mathematical models to support his ideas, and let these two processes support each other until he feels confident enough to put a whole bunch of money on his conviction. That’s his job, to understand his domain in the most robust possible manner.
Imagine if I told him, after hearing about one of these trades, “I dunno man, I think you’re overthinking all this.” That’d be ridiculous.
I like to think I’m a reasonably smart person with a solid mental grasp on the game. I have fantastic coaches who give me quality information on stuff beyond my expertise, and I interpret this information (with their help) into as robust and comprehensive an understanding as we can muster. All of this, by the way, is to create the simplest possible mental model to improve my game in the simplest and most-direct way possible. So I find it really odd that, when I say something like “it’s not that I’m ‘just swinging too hard’, it’s actually a reaction to bad sequencing getting my hands above the plane line and trying to correct, and it has more to do with tempo than actual swing-speed” – that, when I say something like this, the most common response is “you’re overthinking it.”
I mean, this is literally my job. I promise you that I understand what I’m doing better than someone who’s seen me play 18 holes of golf (if that — if any). And then, let’s unpack what “overthinking” actually means: that someone knowing less than I do gives their perspective a position of rhetorical authority. What kind of sense does that make?
Regular readers might be surprised to seemingly see me using this platform to shit-talk a bunch of people I know. Especially considering that these people are probably readers, that they care enough about my game to have opinions, and that they’re probably rooting for me. (All of these qualifiers, for the record, are true of everyone involved.)
To be honest, some of this does bug me — but it especially bugs me because, most of the time, these people are at least sort of right.
This week, I was told that I was swinging too hard and looked tense over the ball and should just relax. I gave the spiel about sequencing and tempo and the plane, and I was told I was overthinking it and all I had to do was “not swing as hard.” Which, like, isn’t really how anything works.
Except for the fact that, when I went to the range the next day, I tried letting my arms hang off my body when I set up to the ball, reducing as much tension as I could — and I started hitting it great. My tempo slowed down, my sequencing got better, and I found the slot more easily. I could mostly stop worrying about what I was doing with my golf swing and focus on what I wanted the ball to do — the real secret sauce that precedes all great golf, whether you call it “top-down attention” or “external focus” or “playing loose.”
It wasn’t quite this simple, in reality. I did a lot of rehearsals to try to get the feeling down, and I was practicing with a metronome in my ear so I didn’t get quick, and I hit a bunch of one-handed shots to try to get the club tracking properly. It took all of this to add up to a far more consistent move than I had the previous day.
But, of course: the guy was still mostly right. I really didn’t need to do much more than relax.
The etiology of this whole thing is something I think I understand better than maybe anything else about myself, and I can blame it squarely on Aristotle.
For those not familiar, Aristole’s primary claims to fame are the following ideas: 1) that humans are separated from animals by our ability to think, and, 2) that the act of thinking is the only human action that is inherently good for its own sake. The upshot here is obvious and also literally presented in the Nichomachean Ethics: that the greatest human good, and what makes for a good life, is to be very wise and spend as much time as possible thinking about things.
Take a moment to consider just how fixated modern US society is on thinking. We think all the time. We try to get to the bottom of things. We all have takes. We’ve christened this “The Information Age,” but that neglects the fact that we’ve been obsessed with thinking for basically ever, probably going all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, if not longer. We are, famously, a country founded on ideas on paper.
And so I internalized this. Given the value our society places on thinking, I, from a young age, tried to think as much as I could about everything. I thought this would serve me well.
In a lot of ways, it has. Thinking has gotten me a long way. Golf is sometimes included here: I do think that being able to look at an approach shot, understand the statistical metrics well enough to know what matters and what doesn’t, and quickly choose a target and a shot based on that analysis — I think this does serve me well.
But there’s another sense in which Aristotle — and Western Society at large — consistently lied to a young kid about the value of thinking and then pulled the rug. I am, in a sense, a living social experiment; I was educated to believe that life is primarily an intellectual endeavor, brusquely told that this has always been false, and left on my own to reinvent the truth from first principles. I’m a modern equivalent of King Fredrick II’s experiment in the 13th century, when he left a bunch of babies alone on an island to see if they’d “naturally” grow up to speak Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. (Expectedly, none of them grew up at all.)
That’s why the “I think you’re overthinking stuff” bugs me. Because, on one hand, I’m not: it’s my profession, and details matter, and who in the world knows too much about the scope of their work to be good at their job? Who is too well informed to be effective? Do you hear how nonsensical that is?
But, at the same time — fucking of course I am. Can’t you see that I’m trying as hard as I can not to?? Fuck!
“The Reason I Play Pro Golf” is multifaceted, in that it can be described in its entirety by multiple mutually-inclusive perspectives. But it’d be entirely accurate to say that my professional golf career — outside of it being fun, that I think I have the talent, that I’m good at it, and that I enjoy getting out of bed in the morning — is that it’s a graduate degree in learning when and how to turn my brain off.
It’s hard for me. I spent like twenty-two years conditioning myself to do the exact opposite. There’s a lot of myelin going to and from my pre-frontal cortex in order to use it as much as possible. I’m learning other ways to get the job done. I’m getting better — more and more frequently, the signal goes somewhere else, to the “just trust it” zones I didn’t learn about in my neuroscience class. It’s working. But it’s slow. But it’s working. Bear with me.
On Friday night, I got a text in a group chat that’s almost never active that people were interested in going out. I was planning on getting to bed early, but I hadn’t been out with these guys in like six months — mind you, the guys on the island here — so I rallied.
The night out was mediocre at best — good company, but it’s not the best bar scene here. Despite our best efforts to rip it up and take it deep, we all shut it down around 11:30. But a few of us went to Waffle House. I got an All-Star Special with scrambled eggs, grits, and bacon. We ate, mostly quietly, tired from a night we’d hoped more from. And then we parted ways and I walked the half mile home.
The way home was well-lit — there aren’t street-lights over the wide sidewalk, but the moon was almost completely full.
Right now, there’s four astronauts headed towards that moon. That moon is traveling 2,288 mph relative to Earth. We used five different defense contracting companies to design and build a rocket that uses two different rocket fuels to get out of Earth’s orbit, and we’re aiming at a point in the sky that, like a QB throwing to a receiver who hasn’t turned his head yet, we know the moon will be in the future.
A lot of thought went into that mission. A lot. But, in the end, the point is fairly un-intellectual. You look up at the moon, and you know where headed there, and you feel something difficult to describe but astonishingly simple to feel. And you look up a while and stare, at the largest celestial body you can really sit and stare at, and you’re glad to.