The most important aspect of nearly every human endeavor is not what we put in, but what we leave out. And how well we learn to do this will define the quality of our outcomes. The idea is one that you will see pop up everywhere, but like all great ideas: Easy to know, hard to practice.
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Tim Ferris talks about leaving out information in the 4-Hour Workweek. He calls it cultivating selective ignorance.
“Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to you goals, and outside of your influence”
When I coded the app Mixeroo I had a thousand ideas but I left out as many of them as I could to make the interface as simple as possible so that a child of any age could just tap a few places and have some fun.
And when I finished the first draft of Telescope:Eyepiece I knew I would have to go back and cut, cut, cut. And then I did a first revision, and then a second. It will most likely see the markings of an editor down the road and I am guessing they will not tell me to put more in.
Our bodies work this way too. I was listening to the Fat Burning Man podcast and he was interviewing Dr. William Davis, the author of Wheat Belly, and he spoke about the idea of eliminating wheat from our diets. But what was really interesting was that he said by just taking out the wheat and making no other changes to diet or exercise he saw drastic results. So our bodies respond in a like manner.
Once you see it, you will see it everywhere. So don’t be afraid to be ignorant or to start over with only your best ideas. I even had to do it with this post. I had a whole section on the idea of homeostasis and I thought it would tie all of this together but… Once more. Easy to know, hard to practice.
Good luck.