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

Some Thoughts On Commodifying Myself

One of the fun little things that I’ve been engaging in recently is essentially a whole block of learning. Every single week, I take part in a set of two different music classes: one for cello and the other for DJing. Along the way, I spend almost all of my […]

Consciousness x Writing Experiment

NB: This was the result of a small experiment on writing and consciousness. It is the result of my pondering aimlessly on a page and then pretty much just letting instinct take me to the end of the page. If it sounds incoherent, that’s possibly unsurprising. If it does sound […]

On Gaslighting Myself

You might notice that I’ve been writing a lot more recently. I don’t know if this is going to continue, but if it does, I think it is the consequence of an interesting new activity that I take part in: gaslighting myself.  Let me give you an example. If you […]

On cognitive switching

One of the things that we discover throughout the course of life is that there’s a distinct difference between thinking that you are being productive or useful and actually being productive and useful.  One of the key parts of that is what we call cognitive switching, which is a phenomenon […]

Discipline and Freedom

Every morning I’m in the gym, I call out:”Hey Siri, one minute!” – and every five minutes I run, I say “Five minutes!”. It’s been like this for a while, as part of some process of systematization that’s started happening in my head sooner than I could say any lickety-splits […]