Here's to the overthinkers.

You may have seen the words. "Start Overthinking." They appeared this week on posts from the Obvious team, and if they made you pause, if they irritated you, if they felt like a provocation, then you felt what was intended. Because the words are not an invitation. They are an accusation.

They accuse the world of teaching you to be small.

Listen: every voice in the culture right now is selling the same lie. That speed is the answer. That more is better. That the way forward is to automate the tedious, scale the output, ship faster, move on. The entire machinery of artificial intelligence has organized itself around this single premise: that you are too slow, and they can make you fast.

But what if slow was never the problem?

What if the real theft, the crime being committed against you every single day, is the systematic suppression of what you know you're capable of?

Think about the last idea that kept you awake. Not the small ones. The one that felt too large, too complicated, too risky to say out loud. The one you've been carrying for weeks, maybe months, waiting for the right moment. Waiting until you're ready.

But what does ready mean? It means you've had time to sand down the edges, organize the loose ends, make it presentable enough that you won't be judged for the messiness of the thinking. It means you've done the work of translation, taking what lives wild and urgent in your mind and domesticating it into something the world will accept.

And so you wait. And the idea stays inside you, half-formed, pacing.

The world calls this overthinking. The world says this is your weakness. That you complicate things. That you slow down the process. That your tendency to ask too many questions, to see too many possibilities, to refuse the easy answer, That this is what's wrong with you.

But what if they were lying?

What if that restlessness, that refusal to settle, that voice in your head that won't stop asking "but what if"… what if that was the gift?

The Japanese understand this. They have a word: monozukuri. It means making things in a way that makes you. The work you do works you. The blade isn't just being made; the maker is being made too. This is what has been stolen from you, the belief that effort is dignified, that the hours spent thinking, refining, questioning, pursuing, that those hours are not waste. They are the work.

Every AI company is selling you the same escape: we'll think for you. We'll do the heavy lifting. You just point, and we'll produce.

But Obvious is not selling escape. It's selling return. Return to the work that matters. Return to the ambition you've been taught to negotiate away. Return to the idea that won't leave you alone.

Because that idea, the one keeping you up, the one you can't let go of, it has chosen you. Not the other way around. You don't climb a mountain because it's easy. You climb because the view in your head won't leave you alone. Because there's something up there that only you can see, and the seeing of it demands that you move.

This is what "Start Overthinking" means. It means stop apologizing. Stop waiting for permission. Stop shrinking the dream to fit the calendar.

It means bring us what's too big. Bring us what feels impossible. Bring us the idea that everyone told you to scale back, the project that seems too ambitious, the vision that you've been carrying alone because no one else could see it yet.
Bring us the gift that's still inside you.

Because here's what they don't tell you about gifts: they don't wait forever. They have a half-life. Every day you sit on them, they lose a little bit of their urgency, their clarity, their power. Not because the idea was wrong, but because you are. Because the world has convinced you that thinking deeply is a luxury you can't afford. That ambition is a risk you shouldn't take. That the work that would make you proud is somehow less important than the work that keeps you busy.

Researchers have a name for what's happening: efficient inefficiency. Give people tools to do more, and they do more. So much more that the volume creates its own overhead, its own chaos, its own new kind of waste. Content marketers go from producing small amounts of clickbait to industrial quantities of it. Developers ship more bugs, faster. The system gets louder, not better.

This is the trap. And "Start Overthinking" is the way out.

Not by doing more. By doing the one thing that matters. By taking the idea that won't let you sleep and giving it the time, the attention, the obsessive care it deserves. By refusing to settle for good enough when you know, you know, that there's something better waiting if you just keep thinking.

We're not building tools that think for you. We're building a workshop that thinks with you. A place where the noise in your head can become something clear. Where the half-formed idea can grow into something whole. Where overthinking isn't a liability, it's the method.

Because the frontier of human potential is still open. It was never geography. It was always internal. The belief that somewhere ahead lies space where your effort and imagination can create something new. Where the work you do doesn't just produce output, it produces you.

The world doesn't need more content. It doesn't need more noise, more volume, more speed.

It needs the thing only you can make. The thing that requires you to think deeper than you've been allowed to think. The thing that demands not less of you, but more.

Start overthinking.