Just Solve Today’s Problems Today

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Jason Roberts and I discuss ~48:31 in Math Academy Podcast 5, Part 1:

“Just solve today’s problems today.

You cannot solve tomorrow’s problems today, because you don’t really understand what those problems are, and you don’t even know if they’re real.

We can imagine all kinds of problems. We can play “what if” forever. It’s mostly a waste of time.

I mean, it’s okay to do a little bit of that, I’m not gonna say you can’t think at all about what the future might look like.

But you got to be careful not to get caught going down that rabbit hole and spending too much time thinking that you can make all these predictions, because you’re probably going to be wrong.

Or at least you’re going to be wrong about the relative importance.

Like, okay, these 10 things I might want to do, but like, there’s the one thing that’s important now and you’re getting distracted by those other 10 things.

Smart people love spending time trying to predict this stuff and thinking through this stuff.

But you got to be careful about overestimating your ability to really pinpoint what they are.

Cause what’ll happen is you’ll over-engineer things.

You’re solving problems that are fake problems. Not real problems.

You over-engineered it.

You came up with this vastly complex solution to a non-problem, to a imaginary problem.

And in the process, you’ve actually created 3 more problems that you don’t see currently because you’re too busy anticipating the future.

If you just waited until the problem actually happened and then you tried this as a patch to the problem, then you’d notice like, shit, this is gonna be more headache.

But if you do that too far in advance, you solve one future headache that you see and then you introduce 3 more that you don’t. And now you’re net behind.”

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