The posted notes are a thing. Better to keep it to myself. So i did. This secret moved me to nashville. It helped me hit the new york times byseller list. It sent me to portugal and greece and even parts of canada that i can't tell you about because it would melt your face right off. For 13 years, i kept the secret in my back pocket, using it to transform my career, my relationships, my health and every other part of my life. Eventually, though, i got curious. Was i the only one the secret could help? I launched a survey with my researcher, mike peasley, ph d. And asked ten thousand people if they struggled with the thing. I figured out more than 99 point ive % of them said, yes. Ok, ok, som, i'm not the only one. I still wasn't ready to share the whole secret, so i cut off a sliver and tested that with thousands of people from around the world. Mike peasley, phd. Analyzed the results, and we were both shocked at what happened. I mean genuinely surprised. Not buz feed, you'll be shocked at what this celebrity's feat look like. Surprised. I'm also going to use mike peasley, p h d's full name, including his docturate every time i mention him, because at times in this book, you'll be tempted to think the writing is so delightful there's there's no way it can also be scientific. But it is. Ask mike peasley, phd. He was there. After 13 years, i'm finally ready. If you'll lean in close, i'll tell you what the secret is. I discovered how to turn over thnking from a super problem into a super power. Bum bum bum. That's the end of the introduction. It doesn't say bum bum bum in it, but i feel like in an audio version you need to be like, what? Cliff hanger? Bum bum bum. It felt better. All right. That's the introduction. Rad for chapter one. Chapter one, the title is, i think i can do this. Overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want. It's one of the most expensive things in the world because it wastes time creativity and productivity. It's an epidemic of inaction, a sunami of stuckness. And 13 years ago, it was dominating me. I was the king of some day, high on thought, low emotion about a litany of things id do evenually. Quit overthinking so much. Co workers would beg it's all in your head, my wife would implore. Get out of your own way. School children would yell as i stumbled through the streets like a heavy brained monster. Did i want to have one thousand, 300, forty five thoughts about whether there would be adequate parking at the new restaurant we were going to did i want to donate an afternoon of brain space to reviewing something dumb, i said to a friend three months ago in the grocery store. Did i want to put off asking for a raise for one more month overthinking the myriad of ways it could go wrong? Of course not. But what could i do? Thoughts are something you have, not something you hon i mean, we can't control them, right? That's why whenever we talk about thinking, we describe it as something outside of us that operates on its own agenda. We say things like i got lost to my thoughts. My thoughts got away from me. She ot carried away by her thoughts. Even if we are very deliberate in other eras of our lives, we tend to treat our thought life as something we have no control over. For example, a simple trick to insure you go to the gem in the morning is to lay out your workout clothes the night before. Picking them ahead of time helps you achieve the result you want. Have you ever heard someone say that about thoughts? Eh, make sure you pick the five thoughts you want to have playing in the background of your head in that meeting to morrow.