If you're smart, ambitious and a deep thinker, why are you still stuck?

Highly intelligent people often overthink, hindering progress. This video advocates for an "octopus" approach: taking small, strategically low-risk steps to build momentum and confidence. Instead of overwhelming oneself with large goals, break them into tiny, manageable actions, gradually increasing challenge and building psychological safety. This method helps overcome procrastination and fear of failure, enabling even the most capable individuals to achieve their goals. Intelligence Paradox: High intelligence can lead to overthinking, risk assessment paralysis, and inaction, hindering progress. The ability to see numerous opportunities and risks can be overwhelming. The Octopus Strategy: A low-risk, incremental approach, like an octopus extending tentacles one at a time, allows for safe exploration and data gathering before committing fully. Strategic Small Steps: Instead of large, daunting leaps, focus on tiny, strategically chosen moves with minimal downside risk. This builds momentum and confidence. Psychological Safety: Create a safe environment to test and learn. Start with small audiences, low-stakes tasks, or free offerings to build confidence and evidence. Incremental Progress: Gradually increase the scale and complexity of tasks. For example, start with one-on-one presentations before moving to larger audiences. Overcoming Fear: Address anxieties by breaking down large goals into manageable steps. Practice and rehearse, even with tools like ChatGPT. The Power of Small Wins: Each successful small step counters negative self-perception and builds confidence, proving initial hesitations wrong. Real-World Application: This strategy has been successfully applied with numerous clients to overcome procrastination and achieve significant progress. From Inaction to Action: This approach helps shift from a state of inaction and paralysis to consistent, productive action, even for highly capable individuals. This segment introduces the core concept: higher intelligence correlates with increased ability to identify opportunities but also heightened awareness of risks, creating a paradoxical situation where increased intelligence can lead to inaction due to excessive risk assessment. The speaker uses an analogy of pressing the gas and brake pedals simultaneously to illustrate how the perceived risks can outweigh the potential benefits, resulting in stagnation. This segment visually represents the relationship between intelligence ("analytical horsepower") and resistance to action. It graphically demonstrates how, initially, increased intelligence is beneficial, but beyond a certain point, the ability to identify risks surpasses the drive to pursue opportunities, leading to paralysis. The speaker explains how this occurs as the ability to see risks increases and overtakes the benefits of intelligence. The speaker proposes a solution: instead of focusing on all potential risks, redirect your analytical abilities to identify strategically low-risk, high-impact moves. The concept of "small steps" is discussed, but with the added emphasis of strategic selection of these steps to minimize downside risk while maximizing learning and momentum. The speaker shares their personal struggle with this concept, highlighting the importance of strategic thinking to overcome the paralysis caused by excessive risk assessment. This segment introduces the "Ollie the Octopus" analogy. The octopus's method of exploration—extending one tentacle at a time to gather information before committing its entire body—is presented as a model for strategic action. This approach allows for low-risk data gathering and continuous progress while minimizing the potential for significant setbacks. The speaker emphasizes the importance of this method for maintaining safety and progress simultaneously. This segment emphasizes the importance of psychological safety and the role of experience in shaping risk perception. The speaker explains that the brain lowers resistance to action only when actions feel genuinely safe. The segment contrasts the advice given by those with extensive experience (who already feel safe) with the reality for those lacking such experience, highlighting the need to create a sense of safety before taking action. This segment provides concrete examples of how to apply the "first tentacle" approach in different scenarios, such as public speaking and starting a business. The speaker illustrates how to break down large tasks into smaller, manageable steps that feel psychologically safe, emphasizing the need to tailor the size of the steps to the individual's level of experience and comfort. The speaker underscores the importance of scaling back to increase psychological safety, preventing procrastination and anxiety.This segment continues with more practical examples of how to apply the "first tentacle" approach, including offering services for free to build confidence, rehearsing sales calls with a friend or AI, and gradually increasing video recording exposure to overcome a fear of public speaking. The speaker shares their personal journey of overcoming their fear of making videos, illustrating the effectiveness of the "first tentacle" approach through a personal anecdote.This segment presents a client success story, demonstrating the effectiveness of the strategy. The speaker shares the journey of a client who overcame a decade-long struggle with inaction by using the "first tentacle" approach. The segment concludes by emphasizing that the brain isn't broken; rather, it's strategic and needs to be used to one's advantage. The speaker highlights the importance of small, safe moves to build confidence and reshape one's perception of capability. Prerequisites: A basic understanding of personal goal setting and self-reflection. No prior knowledge of specific productivity techniques is required. Learning Sequence: Phase 1: Understanding the Problem: Recognize the common issue of high intelligence leading to inaction due to overthinking and risk aversion. Identify your position on the "intelligence vs. progress" spectrum. Analyze how your analytical abilities might be hindering your progress, creating a "brake pedal" effect. Phase 2: Introducing the Octopus Strategy: Learn the core concept of the "Octopus Mode," using incremental, low-risk steps to explore and achieve goals. Understand how this approach mitigates the paralysis caused by overthinking potential failures. Watch the linked videos (mentioned in the transcript) for visual examples of the Octopus strategy. Phase 3: Applying the Octopus Strategy: Practice applying the Octopus strategy to a specific goal. Start with identifying a goal and breaking it down into extremely small, manageable steps. Each step should minimize the risk of failure and provide clear, immediate feedback. Examples include: Public speaking: Start with presenting to one person, then two, then a small group, gradually increasing the audience size. Content creation: Begin with short videos for personal review, then share with a trusted friend, and finally post on social media. Business ventures: Offer a free service, then a low-cost service, before charging full price. Phase 4: Refining the Approach: Continuously evaluate and adjust your approach based on your experiences. Learn to identify and overcome psychological barriers that might hinder your progress. Use self-reflection to understand your hesitations and strategically address them. Practice Suggestions: Identify a Target Goal: Choose one specific goal you want to achieve. Octopus Breakdown: Break this goal down into the smallest possible steps, focusing on minimizing risk and maximizing psychological safety. Step-by-Step Execution: Execute each step meticulously, focusing on the process rather than the outcome. Regular Reflection: Regularly reflect on your progress, identifying what worked well and what could be improved. Seek Feedback: Share your progress with trusted friends or mentors for support and constructive criticism. Embrace Imperfection: Accept that setbacks are a part of the learning process. Learn from mistakes and adjust your approach accordingly. Celebrate Small Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate each small accomplishment to maintain momentum and build confidence. Now, I think this is quite interesting, because this actually does require quite a lot of deep thinking and, and reflection, because to simulate worst-case scenarios, you often need to play out the whole, uh, you know, the whole journey in your mind. That's why, um, at the beginning, sometimes it's a bit slow to start here. but then as you become more intelligent, you can start constructing these, these narratives and these worldviews and you can start seeing where the failure points will happen. So it's actually quite a useful skill if you're trying to mitigate risks in other places. But if you're trying to work on your personal goals, it can often do the opposite. What we have here is if we cross those two graphs, so resistance, and this analytical horsepower or capability, we get this. So at the beginning, you increasing intelligence is beneficial, because you may not have realized all of the downsides to whatever your, whatever opportunities you're thinking about pursuing, but at some point, you, you, you become really, really good at doing that, and then it overtakes it. And so then you end up with this bit. So as long as the red line, which is this resistance factor or pressing the brake pedal is above the green line, it will always end up in you, uh, being in a state of inaction and experiencing paralysis. So ironically, your greatest strength, this ability to risk assess and, and strategic thinking and deep thinking, it actually becomes your trap because we want to make progress.