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Choose Fast: End Overthinking and Own Every Decision
A practical guide for smart, ambitious professionals who want to make hard decisions with speed and confidence—without the spiral
by Shawn Sabbieh
Chapter 1: The Overthinking Trap
You know that feeling. It’s 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, and you’re not asleep. You’re not watching TV, or reading, or even doomscrolling. You’re staring at a ceiling, or a phone screen, or a blank spot on the wall, and you’re running the numbers again. Not the kind of numbers that go on a spreadsheet. The kind that go on an imaginary ledger of your life. If I take the job in Chicago, I can afford a better apartment, but my mom is getting older, and my sister just had a baby, and the winters will be brutal, and what if the market in my field collapses there? But the culture is better, and I’d be closer to that one friend from college, and the 401k match is 4% versus 3.5%, but that’s only if I stay five years, and what if I hate it after two?
And so it goes. For an hour. For three hours. You reset the mental spreadsheet. You change the weighting on the criteria. You imagine the future, then you build a second imaginary future, and then you build a third one just to keep the other two from getting too confident. You’re not making a decision. You’re just thinking about making a decision. The actual decision—the one you’ve been circling like a satellite—might take twenty minutes of real work once you commit. But you’re not committing. You’re orbiting.
I’ve been there. I once spent two full weeks deciding on