People say that I overthink everything. I’ve given this assertion considerable thought, and I don’t believe that it’s true. After all, how can any one person possibly overthink every possible thing in just one lifetime?

For example, suppose I live 85 years. That’s 2,680,560,000 seconds (85 years × 365 days per year × 24 hours per day × 60 minutes per hour × 60 seconds per minute). I’m asleep about a third of the time, so that leaves just 1,787,040,000 seconds to ponder a nearly infinite variety of things. This morning I paused for about two seconds to ruminate about a gray hair. (“Hey, that hair wasn’t gray yesterday.”) At a rate of one cogitation every two seconds, I would have time in life to mull over only 893,520,000 items.

That’s a plethora, for sure. But this number doesn’t seem so big when you consider the large (though shrinking) number of not-yet-gray hairs on my head, or the vast number of ways that you can use Minitab Statistical Software to improve quality in your organization. So, to those who say that I overthink everything, after much deliberation I’m confident that you are mistaken.

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