A note on self-reflection

A friend noted to me that I’m a very self-reflective person, which, although it seems obvious now that I think about it, didn’t really seem to occur to me all that much before. When I first started this blog/this general trend in my life, I saw lots of self-reflection as a good thing. And it was a very good thing––I thought about things I’d never really paid attention to before, and I learned a lot about myself and improved in ways I couldn’t have if I hadn’t spent so much time reflecting.

However, I do think there’s such a thing as “paralysis by analysis.” I can spend so much time thinking about what the right thing to do is and consequently get wrapped up in all of these anxiety-inducing scenarios that I don’t even end up doing the things that I want to do. Although I think it’s good to keep reflecting on what I do, at this point, I need to just focus on doing the things I’ve thought about rather than continually analyze whether or not they’re good for me. And, as things change, think about the things that change rather than about things that I’ve made a decision about already and have yet to develop any further.

An example of this in my life is my current dilemma about which direction to go in my life. If this quarantine has proven to me anything, it’s that not having enough time to explore multiple options is definitely not the reason why I have this dilemma. The only way to make a decision is to gain some new perspective, and I’m thankful that I’ll finally have this summer to gain some perspective on quant, I’ve been working on a startup project to gain perspective on the startup space, and I should probably start looking at getting more serious about research in order to gain even more perspective there too.

With that being said, I like posting regularly on my blog, and the theme of this blog has been a lot of self-reflection. However, I might have some less-reflective blog posts in the future, or even days where I don’t post at all since there hasn’t really been anything new that I’ve been thinking about.

Nike puts it pretty well, so I guess I’m just going to focus on doing stuff now. Thinking is for nerds.