There are situations when time is of the essence, where overthinking it can be a serious problem. Those are situations where the calculation and the algorithm for making the choice has been kind of pre-computed. But those kinds of situations, yes, you want to avoid the kind of information overload of thinking too much about it.
We all face fork-in-the-road moments in our lives. In his 2005 bestseller “Blink,” Next Big Idea Club curator (and this episode’s guest interviewer) Malcolm Gladwell famously argued that snap judgments can be just as effective as meticulous planning. In this lively conversation, author Steven Johnson (“Farsighted”) disagrees, arguing that big, complex decisions require careful thought and scenario-building.