If there is a sin of which I can unreservedly declare my guilt, it is the sin of over-complicating things.

As a thinker, I tend to plan very extensively. I consider different things here and there and everywhere, and this manifests itself very often in just thinking about different factors and considerations that should go into a final plan. At the same time though, this manifests very often in overly complicated content, which in turn highlights another possible problem. 

What if the fundamental problem isn’t actually over-complication, but instead the wrong way of planning, or planning in such a way that it doesn’t serve the goal at the end of the day? 

If one simply were to distill things down to the simplest of all possible elements and in turn just use those things effectively, wouldn’t that create a transformation? 

Wouldn’t that make things significantly easier at the end of the day? 

This is something that I’ve noticed about myself, and it’s something that I would want to resolve in the days ahead. But what I’ve come to recognize and see is that simplicity requires effort. Completion requires work. Shortening requires sacrifice, judgment, and discernment. It’s not something so easy to develop. 

One might say that it’s a talent, but in reality, it’s probably best considered as a skill. One to be honed over many successive days, months, years of practice that go into the development and creation of something that somehow ends up working out.

As with all skills though, it’s not something that one can immediately receive just from having done it one single time. 

Rather, one must do everything to make sure that it is perfect, tailored. 

And although it’s possible to practice for many years, it may be that the person does not reach the destination.

What is required is the correct planning, the correct noticing of inefficiencies, the correct awareness of how to boil down things to their most important elements and to arrange them in order for the benefit of those who will receive it.

There are many things out there that have fostered this reflection, but I see it as my most immediate and prescient area of improvement…

So now to think of a strategy to resolve it.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

The Gift of Consciousness.

A really fun idea struck me this morning: consciousness is really valuable – pretty much everything we buy in the world is the result of another person’s intelligent consciousness taking form and shape as something we are willing to exchange the efforts of our conscious labor for, and even that […]

The Perfect Sequence

An idea I have flirted with time and time again is the concept of the perfect sequence. It is the idea that, relative to a person’s life, there could be a perfect, predetermined set of actions they could take in the correct order (whatever that may be) to achieve the […]

The Things We Do Not Do

One of the things I reflected about this morning was a little less about the things that we do, but rather the things that we don’t do. Why? I guess cause in thinking about life, I’ve come to realize that tradeoffs are inevitable. I guess it was true from the […]

The Advantages Of Speed

I guess you can see that I’ve been having a bit of a blast thinking about how my mind works, how reality works, and so many other things as well – and it is also pretty interesting to reflect how a lot of people who were exposed to it across […]

Process and Reality

…Is the title of a book I have yet to read, but that I’d like to read when I finally get over the monumental beast that is Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, which in turn was a follow-up from Homi K Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, which I decided […]