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Ask HN: Name for people who study without getting around to doing

23 points by billswift ↗ HN
We need a snappy name like "analysis paralysis" that is focused on people who spend all their time studying rather than doing. They (we) intend to do, but never fell like they know enough to start.

55 comments

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manico
This unfortunately describes me too much. Any ideas on overcoming it (please don't say "just do it")?
mechanical_fish
please don't say "just do it"

Okay. Read another book! ;)

(I wonder if I still have Matt Groening's Life in Hell cartoon about grad school, in which he describes this sentence as an all-purpose recipe for avoiding working on your thesis.)

Dilpil
You have just outlined the simplest, most direct way to overcome it.
patio11
Rescale your expectations/plans/schedule such that shipping is easier than not shipping.

My business started with an 8 day deadline, largely because I thought if it was longer it would end like all of my other private projects, with several months spent on research, filling out notebooks, and grand plans followed by a failure to follow through. I figured if it was just 8 days that it would be easier to finish rather than telling Dad et al "Yep, that ended up not going anywhere".

Three years later...

raffi
Make a list before starting. Break it down into small tasks. Or at the very least break the overwhelming task down into smaller milestones, set deadlines for those, plan the living daylights out of the first milestone, get started, and repeat.
billswift
I made a poster (actually, I've made several) years ago trying to get myself moving - the one your comment reminded me of is:

Commit through Action : Do It!

That one has actually helped as a reminder, but I keep falling back into studying instead of doing.

jlees
The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
brazzy
People who should get into research rather than development.
pgbovine
(flamebait warning from someone who is in research) ... research in engineering fields is hardly just about studying and not doing. quite the opposite ... research is all about building prototypes to test out new concepts, and iterating on prototypes. when they were in school, the guys who later went on to found companies like VMWare, Google, and more recently Ksplice were hacking hardcore on prototyping and testing their ideas, not sitting in an ivory tower reading scholarly papers all day ;)
brazzy
Academic research is about publishing papers and little else. Prototypes are rarely iterated beyond proof-of-concept. The people you mention probably left academia exactly because they had to in order to realize their ideas.
xy
Academics?
pavlov
Fisheye visionaries. Their angle of view is so wide that they get motion sickness from the slightest movement. Thus they'll rather remain stationary for as long as possible.
billswift
That actually fits me pretty good, since I also read and study extremely broadly.
diiq
Planning fanatics: planatics.

As for overcoming the syndrome, try taking a workshop in improv comedy; most cities have a troupe that offers community courses now and again. By placing yourself in situations where you cannot help but work faster than your conscious mind can plan, you might break the cycle of preparation. Or try National Novel Writing Month this November. Do something that forces you to actively not-plan, and with luck some of those dynamic-balance tricks will carry over into the rest of your life.

mechanical_fish
This activity you describe -- which I know a whole lot about -- does not really deserve the bad reputation that it has in American culture, let alone the terrible reputation that it has on a website full of entrepreneurs. ;)

I believe it was J. Michael Straczynski -- author of, among other things, a pretty good book on screenwriting -- who said:

Do not confuse a love of reading with a desire to write.

There are lots of names for people who study things without doing them: Anthropologist, writer, scholar, historian, critic, fan, audience member. If you're constantly shying back from taking the leap into doing... listen to yourself! Perhaps your stomach is trying to tell you that you'll have more fun as an observer.

If, on the other hand, your stomach is telling you to jump, perhaps you should listen to that as well.

billswift
The problem isn't learning things, I love that. The problem is when you want to do something, and you keep thinking that learning a little more will help you get it done, then you never get to "getting it done" because there is always more you can learn.
tlb
How do you know what else you need to learn? The best way I know is to try doing whatever it is, and see what's hard. Sometimes you can fill in the gaps in real-time, sometimes you need to go back and study.
billswift
Learning is itself addicting; for me it's almost as addicting, and a lot more fun than TV. Apparently, I'm not the first to feel this way; Heinlein's protagonist in "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" made a similar observation.
joshuarr
Students.
huhtenberg
Technically, the term is forever students and it dates back to 17-18th century, when Peter the Great was sending lots of young Russians to European universities to study everything there was to study. Some ended up studying .. well .. forever, merely accumulating knowledge. Hence the name.
lkozma
As an interesting counter-point, here's Tesla's opinion on Edison:

" His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. "

staunch
Brings to mind the masses of spaghetti code, with thousands of embeded SQL queries, that power(ed) many very successful sites.
lucifer
Tesla was practically a demigod and quite dear, but "worst is better" was the governing principle even in the heydays of the industrial revolution.

That said, your post doesn't make sense. Tesla applied his book learning consistently. I don't see how Tesla is a "counterpoint" to the OP's post.

lkozma
The title and post implied that we probably often overthink/plan things, and we should jump in and start implementing (earlier). According to the quote (if Tesla was right), even such an immensely successful person as Edison tended to plan/learn too little. Which means that probably we plan too little as well, not too much, assuming that we<=Edison. It's a counterpoint in this sense.

Also I think it is only a typo, but "WorsT is better" made me smile ...

lucifer
:) It was a typo.

We can agree to disagree re. Tesla. We have no authoritative insight regarding his "over thinking", but my gut feeling is that the wheels were constantly spinning in his brain.

sage_joch
I don't have ambitions of starting a business, but I consider it a problem that I don't have any recent side projects either. Just throwaway code (from trying to learn a language), and/or notes (from trying to learn a concept). For me, the main issue has always been the thought that I'm not quite ready; that if I just brushed up on X, it would go a long way. Which of course is placing the project on a pedestal. I think the key is to work on small, approachable projects, and see which ones start to grow into something more.

Last night I discovered the You and Your Research speech, and found this interesting quote on why Nobel Prize winners often fail to make breakthroughs after they win: "When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems... The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go." The quote also reminded me of Feynman's story about the flying plate, and how analyzing something unimportant just for fun (and to escape his "real" responsibilities) ultimately started a path to the Nobel Prize.

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clavalle
I know this is for a name but I have a cure: Have a friend or close colleague that always starts without reading -- an eager beaver. You can piggy back on that person's momentum and they can pick your brain when they inevitably get stuck or do something non-optimally because they simply don't know of a better technique.
callahad
That's the situation I'm in right now. The co-founder is of the "Let's get it working now" mentality, while all I want to do is slow down, take out a notepad, and really think through how everything will eventually fit together.

And it causes some friction, especially when working remotely. I'll wake up, look at a checkin, and think to myself "this isn't going to work in the long term."

But you know what? It does work today. And without my co-founder, I'd still be stuck theorizing on how to make things work.

So we've adopted a routine where he forges ahead, and I look at his checkins and do cleanup. It works really well. Instead of trying to conjure a perfect design out of thin air, he delivers a rough approximation, and I steer it towards a "better" or "more maintainable" place when it needs it.

It helps him work, since I'm no longer trying to slow the process, and it helps me work, since I'm now dealing with concrete items.

yannis
At first I thought you were defining a philosopher when you wrote "but never feel like they know enough to start" then I thought it is just the opposite they alway know enough to start but have a never ending story.

I also understood your question to exclude the person who can just afford to study perpetually, just for the love of learning similar to 18-19th century aristocracy.

So we are looking for a name for 'fear to start'. Excluding procrastination we replace fear->phobia, since phobia is Greek we will replace 'start' with 'archi' which results in:

  - archiphobia : fear to start
To be honest I am envious of people who can just afford to do that:)
cjoh
"Baby Boomer"