Outsmarting Ourselves

Overthinking is one of my favorite things to think about.

We humans do an awful lot of thinking. You might even argue that thinking is the thing we do best, but it’s easy to have too much of a good thing.

Thinking too much about a problem you can’t solve can lead to problems in your body, like higher blood pressure and inflammation. Your body’s immune system can be weakened, and stress can even lead to heart disease.

Thinking too much at night can keep you awake. You can lose out on sleep, and that can really mess you up.

Today, I want to look at more literal examples, though. These are cases where people thought way too much about something, and then lived to regret it. No, their brains didn’t explode, but they clearly would have been a whole lot better off if they had just stopped thinking so much.

The Battle of Red Cliffs stands out as a great first example. After decades of relative stability, the Eastern Han Dynasty was crumbling, leaving a power vacuum that ambitious warlords sought to fill.

One of these warlords was named Cao Cao, a powerful leader in the north who controlled the strategic Yangtze River valley. He began to spread south, seeking to control the entire trade on the river. This would undoubtedly lead to him controlling all of China.

In answer to this, an unlikely alliance was born between two rivals: Sun Quan, the leader of Eastern Wu in the south, and Liu Bei, another warlord seeking to restore the Han Dynasty.

Eventually, the battle ended up in the Yangtze River itself. Cao Cao sat down to really, really think this one out. He decided it was a good idea to chain all of his ships together, so they wouldn’t rock about so much in the river, and his sailors could avoid seasickness.

A general named Huang Gai pretended to defect to Cao Cao's side, claiming dissatisfaction with the southern alliance. He offered ships to Cao Cao as a sign of loyalty, kind of echoing the Trojan horse of Greek lore.

These ships were loaded with flammable materials like kindling and oil. As soon as the wind was blowing in the right direction, Huang Gai lit the ships on fire. The conflagration was immense and nearly immediate.

The chained ships caused a chain reaction.

1800 years later, the Coca-Cola company set the branding world on fire with a miscalculation stemming from a similar need for control, and way too much thinking about one thing.

Coca-Cola is one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and for nearly 100 years, the formula had remained unchanged. Coke had its murky origins that included an original recipe featuring wine and cocaine, but once the formula been dialed in, it became a national landmark for flavor.

When Pepsi came out with an innovative marketing gimmick that began to threaten Coke’s dominance, the company felt like it needed to respond boldly. Check out this Pepsi Challenge video from 1982, so you can get an idea of Coca-Cola’s concerns:

Executives at Coke worked closely with the marketing team to brainstorm a truly audacious strategy: they would get rid of the original formula of Coca-Cola, replacing it with something sweeter, so that it would be in line with Americans’ increasing lust for refined sugar.

New Coke certainly seemed like a good idea at the time. In blind taste tests, it was a clear winner over the classic formula, so the company decided to throw Coke’s incredible marketing weight behind the switch, launching a massive campaign to let everyone know about the new formula.

The following events are seared into my memory, probably one of my most vivid from that age. I think I learned a great deal about human nature during that weird transitional time, as the American public absolutely lost its collective mind over this. The outrage was palpable and inescapable.

People I knew hoarded the original Coca-Cola cans and bottles. Others felt betrayed by the perceived broken promise of a hundred year formula, ever-steady in a rapidly changing world.

The U-turn was fast and decisive. Three months after the experiment began, Coca-Cola Classic returned with its original formula intact, and New Coke became a ghost.

It seems worth pointing out that Coca-Cola simply put too much stock in the actual flavor of their product. Edward Bernays showed that the underlying psychological factors were far more important than the quality of the product or the price, and Coca-Cola’s subsequent marketing, especially during World War II, showed that they understood this well.

Photo: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

Unfortunately for companies everywhere, desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, and those can often backfire. Thinking too much about one aspect of the company’s woes—the Pepsi challenge, theoretically based on flavor—cased the executives running the show to go far down one particular rabbit hole, overthinking the flavor aspect.

Cao Cao and Coca Cola both had this in common: they went down rabbit holes. They thought so much about one aspect of things without coming up for air, so they ended up overthinking, filling that rabbit hole up with conclusions and inferences. Chaining ships tightly together and replacing a 100-year-old formula were the gravel used to fill the two rabbit holes we’ve discussed today.

Clearly, over-thinking can be damaging and painful, and not only to the person doing the thinking.

What are some other instances of over-thinking one aspect? This is a really broad question, since you can think about everything from marketing to warfare, but let’s put our thinking caps on for a bit today!