Back in the days when radio reigned supreme, before TV, I was a child, as children are, rich in curiosity and imagination.

I listened to the music, wondering where it came from.

It seemed to be made by the radio. I concluded the musicians had to be in there, somewhere. Went looking for them - without success.

I expanded the search by using my mum’s knitting needles. When at the end of the needle I heard a sound - “Ouch!” - I figured it was them reacting to the knitting needle, as I would in their place.

My parents never knew about it.

Now is today.

I listen to people expressing thoughts, wondering where they come from. It seems the thoughts are made by the people themselves. I conclude the making of thoughts happens "in there" somewhere, mostly in peoples' heads.

I'm told no-one has ever seen a thought in anyone's head, dead or alive, much less captured one. Large, powerful teams of people keep looking, using technology way more advanced than my mother's knitting needles. They find traces of thoughts, and additional evidence. The actual thoughts themselves - unfathomable, Loch Ness Monster-like, rumored to exists, but ...

We keep looking. Rather like the cat chasing the red dot at the end of the laser beam made by the toy specially made for cats.

What if our "mind sets" are to thoughts what "radio sets" are to music?
What if our thoughts aren't ours? What if they are in reality out there?
With the spirits and angels, with love and fear?
What if they come through us, but not of us?

What if mind sets, just like radio sets, come with buttons and dials, to tune in and tune out, to up the volume and reduce it, to switch on and switch off?

Wouldn't that be something?!
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First off, let it be clear, there’s strictly nothing wrong with thinking per se! In fact, thinking is the greatest thing since instinct. Many things are greatest since sliced bread, but thinking is the greatest thing since before we could think. Opinions differ as to when we changed from non-thinking to thinking, or whether we have in fact ever made the transition, but even the staunchest supporters of non-evolution theory agree, it must have been before sliced bread.

If thinking as the greatest thing has been around for such a long time, what can we possibly do wrong with it?

Well, I know some people - some of them I know personally very well :-) - who relied on thinking to improve their lives. They tried for a long time, even years, without much to show for it. They tried thinking this and that, learning new ways of thinking and spending good money in the process. All to little or no avail. The need to think about improving their lives had gathered momentum through a series of events loosely referred to as life accidents – divorce, illness, accident, financial ruin, addiction, etc. -  but by and large it happened in the manner of a warning light on a car dashboard.

When a warning light appears on a car dashboard initially, typically at an inopportune time, most of us choose to … ignore it. As if the purpose of a  warning light were to think about it. Subsequently, each time the car is started the light shows up again, only to be pushed back to where it belongs again – to the back of the mind. Hoping for the best, never quite knowing what will happen and when, until when happens and hope is not enough anymore.  At long last the car’s owner manual is consulted, in the hope to fix the problem without the help (and cost) of a mechanic.

However, ignoring a warning light on the dashboard is in most cases but a symptom of the underlying problem of overthinking. For most people who are consistently unsuccessful at changing their lives for the better, the real issue is they are thinking too much, at the expense of not acting enough. It may sound counter-intuitive. How can you do anything too hard? Conventional wisdom teaches the harder the better. Well, conventional wisdom can be wrong, too. Thinking by itself only ends up in overthinking, and overthinking actually prevents change. The primary purpose of warning lights is not thinking, but to act!

7 Steps To Stop Overthinking And Start Doing

1. Replace Ready-Aim-Fire by Ready-Fire-Aim. Do not overthink the possible consequences of your actions before you take them. Life is not the Olympics Game where the opportunity to excel and show off comes around every four years only – and only if you’re perfectly healthy, fit and in the prime of your life. Life happens now. There are many “now” in a day. Just do it - fire, then use feedback from the shot just fired to aim the next shot. Then do it again. Taking aim is okay, but correct your aim only after you go along, not before you even start.
2. Act. It doesn’t matter whether you end your (over)thinking with a big or small action, provided you act. Start with anything. Don’t think of size, think only of action. Allow yourself to act on even the smallest part of the idea you’re thinking about. Act, act, act. Taking massive action is your miracle cure for overthinking.
3. If you’re still only thinking, you have not really decided. You need bigger motivation or greater discipline, possibly both. Start with bigger motivation. Is the idea you’re dreaming and thinking about truly important, to you? Would you live a thousand years on water and bread, rather than leave the dream unfinished? If not, find yourself a bigger dream. Don’t just think about finding yourself a bigger dream, take action. Remember, to find is a verb.
4. Good is good enough. An okay plan consistently acted upon and executed works miles better than a perfect  plan executed whenever the time is right. The time to act is always right if the dream you’re dreaming is right.
5. Every morning take the time to visualize your dream, as well as your current situation relative to the dream. Visualization involves intense feelings and emotions. The every morning routine is not about thinking your dream, it’s about living it, visualized in your mind. Picture your dream as you would picture yourself at the beginning of a long trip across the country. Know your destination and your starting point, then choose the best route for you  to get from here to there. Locate yourself on the mental map of your dream, relative to where you are and to where you intend to go.
6. Share your dream with your best friends. Are they touched, moved and inspired by it? If not, improve your dream … until they are, until YOU are, truly touched, moved and inspired by your new, improved dream.
7. Choose your environment. Make sure the people you spend most of your time with are as action-oriented as you, or more so. Rather than choose your friends, choose the environment(s) within which you move. Your friends will come from within the environments you make yours.

Good luck in your new life of thinking AND massive action every day!

Bob Dylan just might be fixin' to return to the recording studio soon again - without his guitar this time. He’s contemplating satellite navigation, in talks with car companies to be the voice of their GPS systems. "I think it would be good if you're looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like, 'take a left at the next street, no, a right, you know what, just go straight'," he said. "I probably shouldn't do it because whichever way I go, I always end up in one place - on Lonely Avenue."

Beyond its newsworthiness, reports of Dylan doing GPS begs this question: if we were looking for directions and heard your voice, where would it take us? Where is your voice taking you?

PS. If you've ever experienced Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour - thanks to a friend I'm lucky to have the full recordings - you'd know he'd make a memorable GPS.

Napoleon Hill "live" in rare footage from the early 1960's. Shown here for it's curiosity & documentary value more than actual content of his somewhat flat presentation.

The importance of imagination is well recognized. Imagination is said to be the starting point of all achievement, the world but its canvas and the human race is governed by it. However, one important key aspect of imagination - the interplay of imagination with time - is generally overlooked. As a result, many peoples' power of imagination ends up greatly diminished.

Understanding the interplay of imagination with time is of key importance because there are three dimensions of time, but only one imagination. The three dimensions of time are:  the past, the present and the future. It is little understood, yet imagination works only in one of the three dimensions. Put differently, to access the three dimensions of time, we have been given three keys. The three keys are memory, knowledge and imagination. Most people tend to look at memory and knowledge as well-behaved children, while  imagination carries the air of the unruly one who engages in daydreaming and acting foolish. Everybody knows how dangerous that can be. Something bad could happen, heavens forbid. Let's not judge a book by its cover, and take a closer look at how the three dimensions of time interact with the three dimensions of human thought. You will quickly see there are no good or bad children. They're simply kids and each has its role.

Memory = The Past. Memory interacts with and is the key to the past. Memory works highly selective, sometimes excellent, sometimes bleeping awful. You remember things you want to remember, but not all the things. You remember things you don't want to remember (things you'd rather forget). You forget what you had for lunch last week, and  remember in a foul mood kicking the family dog eons ago when no-one was watching. If you write things down in a journal, you discover your memory can fail you in big ways.

Knowledge = The Present. Knowledge operates only in the present. It cannot escape the boundaries of present time (any more than you can). As an example, take breathing. You KNOW you are breathing right now, in the present. You REMEMBER you were breathing yesterday, in the past. You IMAGINE you'd still be breathing tomorrow, in the future. Knowledge is extremely limited in time, so to speak. They - whoever they may be - want you to believe they have knowledge of the past and the future, too. Bullpoop. As a simple test, challenge them to lift their arm tomorrow, or try it for yourself. (Can't do it. By the time you get to tomorrow it's the present, again).

Imagination = The Future. Last and so very famously not least, imagination. It's your key to the future. The only one. Don't lose or discard it. Else you'd have to give up on the future altogether, or seeing it would depend on somebody else's imagination. Imagine that! Before you consider whether it might actually be a good deal, remember the people who are all for change provided it doesn't disturb their status quo. Without imagination you'd be without a future and without a self-image, too. Self-image, the word says it all, the product of your imagination - or of someone else's, if you let them. How do you see yourself a year from now and five years from now? Memory and knowledge can be useful in creating your future, but grounded in past experience rather than future possibilities, they'll mostly hold you back.  When used freely and responsibly, imagination will give you wings. Practically speaking, you may want to imagine having just received a call from your favorite movie director. She or he wants to make a movie with you. The topic of the movie is your life from here onwards. You're cast in the leading role. You are also to submit the script. Imagine writing the script of the movie of your life, with you in the leading role. Wishing you great fun, and passion.