Students were given strawberry jams to taste and rate. Some just tasted and said which they liked. Others were first asked to analyse why they liked or disliked each one. Then both groups' ratings were compared with those of a panel of food experts.
The students who had analysed their reasons agreed less with the experts. Thinking harder about the jam made them worse at judging jam. Jam. The one thing nobody needs a framework for.
That is the trap this article is about: overthinking, and the quiet way smart people sabotage their careers with it. If you are good at analysis, you are tempted to analyse everything, and some things get worse when you do. A conversation analysed while it is happening is a conversation you are not having. A networking email drafted seventeen times is one that never gets sent. A brilliant colleague who treats every chat like a logic puzzle is Sherlock Holmes at a drinks reception: superb at deduction, hopeless at small talk.
None of this means your intelligence is the problem. It means it has been pointed at the wrong things, and that is fixable. Here is how to stop.
Thinking too much
The jam test had a second part. Students choosing college courses were asked either to analyse their reasons or to weigh up every feature of every course before deciding. Both kinds of careful thinking led to choices that matched expert opinion less than the choices of students who did neither. Analysing reasons pulls attention towards whatever is easy to put into words, and that is not always what matters. Weighing everything blurs the differences between the options.
The same thing happens to skills you already have. Experienced golfers putted more accurately when they were distracted than when they were told to pay attention to each step of the stroke, and expert footballers dribbling with their stronger foot did the same. Beginners did better attending to the steps. Once a skill is yours, thinking about how you do it gets in its way, and for a seasoned professional in a meeting, that skill is conversation.
Careers are full of decisions like this, and the analytical mind turns each one into a project. Which conference is worth it. Which contact to approach. What to say in the first line.
You see every way it could go wrong, so you wait, and while you wait, the conference sells out and the contact moves on. Caution is a fine quality in a bridge engineer. In a career, it mostly looks like absence.
More good options make it worse. When the choice on offer was enlarged or improved, people became more likely to put the decision off, keep looking, or fall back on the default. Three good job offers can end in none, and five good contacts to approach can end in no message at all.
Homework becomes procrastination in a good suit. You can know everything about a person's projects, background and mutual connections and still never get in touch. Think Carefully: The Way You Think Might Be Rewiring Your Reality has the honest verdict on the mental version: dwelling feels like working the problem out, and mostly keeps the problem company.
The perfect draft
Part of the reason starts early. In six tests, schoolchildren praised for being intelligent cared more about looking good than about learning. After a failure, they persisted less, enjoyed the task less and did worse than children praised for their effort, and they came to see intelligence as something fixed. If being clever is who you are, every risk is a test you could fail.
The draft folder is where analytical careers go to wait. Every message has to be exactly right, every introduction strategically sound, every conversation worth its time.
Why Your 'High Standards' Are Holding Back Your Career, linked below, has what this costs, and that asking for advice makes people look more competent, not less. When 95 investigations of perfectionism at work were pooled, perfectionists were more motivated and put in longer hours, and the part of perfectionism driven by fear of mistakes went with burnout, impostor feelings and putting things off. It also has the comfort: the audience notices far less than you think. Students sent into a room in an embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirt guessed that about half the people there would remember it, and about a quarter did. And people saw their own asking for help as weakness, and the same act by someone else as courage.
The imperfect message that gets sent beats the perfect one in the drafts folder every time, because only one of them can be answered. Nobody has ever replied to a draft.
Liking decides
Here is a finding that offends the analytical mind. When the work networks inside three organisations were mapped, people chose whom to go to for help on a task partly on competence and partly on whether they liked the person. Dislike made competence nearly irrelevant: people did not seek out a colleague they disliked however capable that colleague was. Competence only started to count once there was some active liking first.
That changes what the "small" behaviours cost. Checking your phone while colleagues talk about their weekend. Steering every chat towards the strategic topic. Correcting someone's figure when the exact number did not matter. Jumping straight to the solution when they wanted to be heard. Each is a small withdrawal from the liking account, and the account decides who gets asked onto the interesting project.
The fixes are small too. Ask about the weekend and listen to the answer. 7 Communication Tips for Your Relationship has the simplest one: when someone shares something, ask the second question.
Let the wrong figure go when the right one changes nothing. Being right is a fine hobby. It is a poor career strategy. And 10 Powerful Tips for Choosing the Right People to Surround Yourself With, linked below, has the reason to relax: after a conversation, people underestimate how much the other person liked them. Dale Carnegie's has been making the case for the small, warm behaviours since 1936.
Which ties bring work
The analytical instinct is to network efficiently: a few high-value contacts, carefully chosen. A test on a huge scale suggests otherwise.
Over five years, LinkedIn randomly varied the connections its "People You May Know" feature suggested to more than 20 million members. In that time, 600,000 new jobs came out of the network. The contacts that helped most with job moves were neither the closest ones nor the weakest, but the ones in between: moderately weak ties, the people you know a little, with a few connections in common.
So the casual coffee is not a waste of an hour. The colleague from another department, the former classmate, the person you met once at a conference and liked: those are the ties that carry news of work you would never hear about otherwise. 10 Powerful Tips has why the casual acquaintances are worth keeping in the first place, and why a short message to an old contact is appreciated more than the sender expects.
If the drinks reception is the hard part, act the part for an hour. When people were asked to act extraverted for a while, they felt more positive whatever their usual temperament, and the introverts acting out of character showed no cost in mood. You do not have to become someone else. You only have to borrow them for the evening. You manage it at weddings already.
Give first
The analytical person often waits until they have something to ask for, then agonises over how to ask. The order works better the other way round.
The Art of Influencing Others: The Power of Effective Communication has the tools: give first, and ask for advice. It also has why Benjamin Franklin borrowed a book from an enemy.
This is where your strengths become an advantage. Share the insight you noticed. Make the introduction that helps two people you know. Offer to look over a colleague's analysis.
Volunteer for the project that crosses departments. Teach someone newer what took you years to learn. Each of these builds a relationship around what you are good at, without a minute of forced small talk. Usefulness is the analyst's version of charm, and it lasts longer. Keith Ferrazzi's is a whole book built on that order: give generously first, ask later.
And say thank you, in writing. When helpers got a short written thank-you, they were more willing to help again, both the person who had thanked them and someone new, because they felt valued. In a field test, a manager's note of thanks raised the number of calls university fundraisers made. A two-line thank-you is the cheapest tie you will ever build.
The promotion
Expertise does not speak for itself. You may be the best analyst in the building, but if the people who decide do not know what you did, it did not happen as far as they are concerned. Show the work. Say what you found, in a sentence, to the people who need to know it.
How you say it matters. Across nine tests, humblebragging, a boast dressed up as a complaint or as modesty, a line like "so exhausted from being asked to lead another project", made people less liked and seen as less competent than a plain brag. The complaint kind did worse even than plain complaining. If you did something good, state it, and let the result carry it.
And be careful what you wish for. When the records of sales workers at 131 firms were studied, the firms tended to promote their best salespeople, and the best salespeople made worse managers. Promotion decisions leaned on how well people did their current job rather than on the traits that predicted managing well. Somewhere, a brilliant salesperson is being a terrible manager right now. The workplace is not a pure meritocracy in either direction: the best performer is not always the one promoted, and the one promoted is not always the best at the next job.
That cuts both ways for you. Being excellent is not enough to get noticed. And the job above yours may need skills that excellence in your current one does not give you, which is worth knowing before you resent the person who got it.
Distance makes the visibility problem worse. When call-centre staff at a large Chinese travel company were randomly sent to work from home for nine months, they did 13% more work and quit half as often, but were promoted less often for the same performance. Finding Balance: 8 Ways to a Healthier Work-Life Dynamic has the later, gentler result: two days a week at home, with no drop in performance reviews or promotions. If you work from home, make your work seen on purpose.
What to do instead
Give the preparation a limit. Decide how long the reading-up and the drafting get before you start, set a wind-up , and send what you have when it rings.
Pair every insight with one action. Understanding who holds influence in your team is useful only if you then talk to them. The 4 Laws of Behavior Change: How to Build Better Habits for a Healthier, Happier Life has why a plan for when and where turns intentions into action.
Watch the ratio. In your next meeting, count how many times you speak against how many times you think about speaking. If the second number is much bigger, you have found your problem.
The ratio matters more than it seems. In small groups working on a problem together, the amount each person spoke predicted who emerged as the leader, and it still did after intelligence, personality and gender were taken into account. The quiet analyst with the best idea in the room is not the one the room follows. Say the idea out loud, early, before you have finished polishing it. Polish is for shoes.
There is a twist that favours the quiet ones, though. In pizza stores, managers rated as outgoing made more profit when their staff were passive, and less when their staff were proactive, because they listened less to people with ideas. The same pattern held in the lab. Talk enough to be heard, and listen enough that the people with ideas keep bringing them.
Intelligence plus action
The students who analysed their jam did not lack intelligence. They pointed it at the wrong part of the job. The same is true of the email in your drafts folder and the conference you read up on instead of attending.
Your intelligence is not the problem. Your relationship with action is. The people who do well are not the ones who think the longest. They are the ones who think clearly, then do something. Thinking was never the problem. Stopping was.
This week, send one short message to someone whose work interests you, and do not redraft it.
Rewording the same email for the fourth time? Why Your 'High Standards' Are Holding Back Your Career — the two kinds of high standards and how to tell which one you've got, why the harmful kind makes you put things off, how fast it is spreading, and seven ways to keep the bar high without paying for it.
Not sure who is worth your time? 10 Powerful Tips for Choosing the Right People to Surround Yourself With — whether the "average of five" holds up, why the casual acquaintances are worth keeping, how many hours it takes to make a friend, and why an old contact is worth a message.
Know someone with seventeen drafts of the same email? Send them this, and tell them to send draft one.
Disclaimer: This article is general information about work and relationships. If worry about work keeps you awake, stops you acting for weeks, or comes with low mood, talk to someone you trust or to a qualified health professional.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, All For Life earns from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. We only link to products we would recommend without the commission.
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