Don't overthink it

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been touring Europe this week, Paris to London to Berlin, announcing billions in AI investments and repeating a blunt piece of advice: don't overthink it.

In London he put it as plainly as you can. Standing in a street-side Q&A in Mayfair, he praised Britain's universities, culture, and energy, then landed the punchline that has been circulating ever since:

"But for some reason, if there was a million ways to win, you find the one reason not to do it."

Then the line that stuck with me:

"Don't overthink things. Take a step forward, and that step will lead to another step."

Rowland Manthorpe posted a clip of it on X the same day. HotMinute, the Telegraph, and others ran with it. By Berlin, talking with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Business Insider framed the whole tour around one theme: Europe has talent and industry, but spends too long analyzing risk instead of building.

What makes the message land is who he aimed it at. The UK. Germany. Places with "superpowers in intellect," as he put it, that somehow still default to the one reason not to move.

Huang's entrepreneur contrast makes the same point. Tell an entrepreneur there is a one-in-a-million chance and they hear: so you're telling me there's a chance? Tell the overthinker and they hear 999,999 reasons to wait.

Waiting feels safe. It rarely is. The cost of overthinking is not only delay. It is that you never get the feedback that would have made the thinking useful. The first step teaches you what the second step should be. Speculation does none of that.

This is not an argument for recklessness. Don't overthink it does not mean don't think. It means stop using analysis as a substitute for motion.

Talent is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is often the quiet refusal to take the next imperfect step.

Don't overthink it.

Take a step forward. That step will lead to another step.