The Thinking Game vs The Doing GameWhy Smart People Choose Ideas Over Action

There’s something seductive about living in the world of ideas. For many intelligent people, thinking isn’t a prelude to action—it’s the main event. They’re not paralysed by analysis; they’re genuinely more comfortable, more stimulated, and more at home in the realm of concepts than in the messy world of implementation.

And honestly? There are reasons for this preference.

The Appeal of Pure Thought

Thinking feels productive without the risk. When you’re exploring an idea, researching a concept, or working through a theoretical problem, you get all the satisfaction of intellectual engagement with none of the vulnerability of putting something real into the world. Every insight feels like progress, every connection between concepts feels like achievement.

The world of ideas is controllable. In your head, or in discussion with other smart people, ideas can be elegant, complete, and perfect. You’re operating in a domain where you’re competent, where the rules make sense, where intelligence directly translates to results.

It’s immediately rewarding. Encountering something new, having an insight, or engaging in stimulating intellectual discussion provides instant gratification. Action, by contrast, often involves long periods of grinding through mundane details before you see any payoff.

The Comfort of Competence

Many intelligent people grew up being rewarded for thinking well. School, university, academic careers, many corporate environments—they all signal that understanding concepts, analysing problems, and demonstrating intellectual sophistication are the most valuable skills.

So it’s natural that people gravitate towards what they’re good at and what gets them recognition. If you’ve spent twenty years being praised for your ability to think through complex problems, why wouldn’t you prefer that to the uncertain world of execution?

In the thinking realm, smart people are undeniably smart. They can engage with complex ideas, see patterns others miss, and make sophisticated connections. In the doing realm, intelligence helps, but it’s often secondary to persistence, practical skills, building interpersonal relationships, market timing, or just plain luck.

In the world of pure ideas, social skills, networking ability, and relationship-building don’t matter much – but in the real world of execution, your ability to work with others, persuade people, and navigate interpersonal dynamics often matters much more than raw intellectual horsepower.

The Crucible of Reality

There’s another comfort in thinking that’s harder to admit: as long as your idea stays in your head, it remains perfect. The brilliant business concept, the novel you’ll write, the app that would change everything—they’re all flawless until you actually try to build them.

Implementation means subjecting your ideas to the crucible of reality—and reality is an unforgiving judge. It doesn’t care how elegant your theory is or how many edge cases you’ve considered. It only cares whether your solution actually works when real people use it in real situations with real constraints.

The crucible of reality reveals gaps between your assumptions and truth, between your models and actual behaviour, between what should work and what does work. It means discovering that your elegant solution has seventeen unexpected complications. It means producing something that’s embarrassingly far from the perfection you imagined.

Many smart people intuitively understand this, and they’re not necessarily wrong to be hesitant. In the world of pure thought, you’re never wrong in ways that matter. In the crucible of reality, you’re wrong constantly—and publicly.

The Execution Gap: Even Business Recognises This

The preference for thinking over doing isn’t just an individual quirk—it’s such a pervasive pattern that business literature has extensively documented it. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s seminal book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (2002) was written precisely because they observed brilliant strategists and intellectually gifted leaders consistently failing at implementation.

Their core insight? Execution isn’t just applied thinking—it’s a fundamentally different discipline requiring different skills, different mindsets, and different types of intelligence. Most organisational failures aren’t due to bad strategy but to the massive gap between what gets planned in boardrooms and what actually gets delivered in the real world.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: implementation is hard, hard, hard. It’s not just different from thinking—it’s genuinely more difficult in ways that pure intellectual work rarely prepares you for. Implementation means dealing with broken systems, uncooperative people, unexpected technical constraints, shifting requirements, budget limitations, and a thousand tiny decisions that no amount of upfront planning can anticipate.

Where thinking rewards you for considering all possibilities, implementation punishes you for not choosing one path and sticking with it through inevitable setbacks. Where thinking values elegant solutions, implementation forces you to accept clunky workarounds that actually function. Where thinking celebrates sophistication, implementation demands brutal simplification.

As Saint-Exupéry wrote, ‘Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away’ (1939). Implementation forces this kind of perfection—the perfection of ruthless elimination. But for minds that find beauty in complexity and sophistication, this gets rehected as dumbing down rather than improving.

Execution feels like playing by different rules entirely.

The book validates what smart people rarely intuit (not so smart, then): strategic thinking and execution operate by different rules. In strategy sessions, the person with the most sophisticated analysis wins. In execution, success goes to whoever can navigate complex human dynamics, persist through mundane details, build coalitions amongst stakeholders with conflicting interests, and adapt when reality inevitably differs from the plan.

Bossidy and Charan found that many leaders treated execution as something beneath their intellectual pay grade—a ‘just make it happen’ afterthought to the real work of strategic thinking. But execution, they argued, actually requires more complex judgement calls, more nuanced people skills, and more tolerance for ambiguity than pure strategy work.

No wonder intelligent people gravitate towards the thinking realm. It’s not just more comfortable—the business world itself has yet to acknowledge that execution is a different game entirely.

The Social Rewards of Sophistication

In many intellectual communities, the person who can reference the most research, identify the most nuanced considerations, or explain the most complex frameworks gets social status. Depth of knowledge and sophistication of thinking are currency.

Actually shipping something? That’s often seen as crude, commercial, or anti-intellectual. The person who says ‘I’ve been thinking about this problem for years’ gets more respect than the person who says ‘I built something that partially solves this problem.’

This creates environments where thinking is not just more comfortable—it’s actively more rewarded than doing.

The 85/15 Reality

So how much time do smart people actually spend thinking versus doing? For many, it’s genuinely about 85% thinking, 15% doing—and they prefer it that way.

This isn’t necessarily wrong. The world needs people who think deeply, who explore ideas thoroughly, who can see implications and connections that others miss. Pure researchers, theorists, and analysts provide enormous value.

But it’s worth being honest about what you’re optimising for.

Two Different Games

The Thinking Game rewards depth, sophistication, and intellectual rigour. Success means understanding more, seeing further, and thinking more clearly than others. The goal is insight, elegance, and ‘truth’.

The Doing Game rewards results, persistence, and practical problem-solving. Success means creating things that work, solving real problems, and producing value for others. The goal is impact, utility, and change.

Both games are valid. Both are valuable. But they require different mindsets, different skills, and different comfort zones.

The Honest Question

The real question isn’t ‘How can I think less and do more?’ It’s ‘Which game do I actually want to play?’

If you genuinely prefer the thinking game—if you find more satisfaction in understanding complex systems than in building simple solutions—then lean into that. Become the person who helps others think more clearly about problems. Embrace being the researcher, the adviser, the person who sees what others miss.

But be honest about the choice. Don’t pretend you’re preparing to do when you’re actually choosing to think. Don’t frame your preference for ideas as ‘not being ready yet’ to act.

The Hybrid Approach

Some people find ways to bridge both worlds. They use thinking as a tool for better doing, or they find ways to make their thinking actionable. They might:

Write to share their insightsTeach to help others implement better solutionsConsult to apply their analytical skills to real problemsBuild tools that help other people think more clearly

The key is recognising that thinking and doing aren’t necessarily sequential—they can be integrated in ways that honour both preferences.

Embracing Your Preference

There’s nothing wrong with preferring the comfort of thinking. The world needs people who go deep, who consider implications, who think through complex problems before others rush to solutions.

But own that preference. Be honest about what energises you, what you’re genuinely drawn to, and what kind of contribution you want to make.

Because the real problem isn’t smart people who think too much—it’s smart people who aren’t honest with themselves about what they actually want to do with their intelligence.

Postscript: I’d much prefer to be doing Organisational Ai Therapy than thinking and writing about it. But until I luck in to that…

Further Reading

Bossidy, L., & Charan, R. (2002). Execution: The discipline of getting things done. Crown Business.

Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. Random House.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94(2), 211-228.

Pfeffer, J., & Sutton, R. I. (2000). The knowing-doing gap: How smart companies turn knowledge into action. Harvard Business Review Press.

Saint-Exupéry, A. de. (1939). Wind, sand and stars. Reynal & Hitchcock.

Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2015). Superforecasting: The art and science of prediction. Crown Publishers.