Hello blog. It’s been awhile. You’re looking good.

I’ve missed you.

Anyway.

A heuristic that I’ve seen pop up, in several different arenas, is the principle of doing more with less. To be successful, really successful, it’s necessary to strip things down to the absolute minimum. Find the essence of what you’re trying to do, and, to the extent thats possible, focus on it to the exclusion of everything else*. If you can make that raw essence exceptional, everything else will be easy.

Fine, I can roll with that. My problem is that it’s a deceptively difficult trick to pull off in practice.

Sure, it sounds easy to just trim away everything superfluous from your raw passions… until you’ve tried to do it, and find yourself left with… *counts*…a list of seven or eight things that you still think you need to focus on. Several months ago I wrote that I found myself being driven by three masters. They seem to have multiplied since then. It’s not something I can come close to satisfying, much less sustaining.

Of course, this just means that I haven’t yet found the essence of what I’m trying to do (which is it’s own disappointment, given that it’s been bouncing around in my head for months at this point). What I have is seven or eight lenses onto something more basic beneath, something I haven’t yet completely grasped. That needs to be my next step – until I do, my actions will be muddled, pulling me in seven or eight different directions instead of where I want to be going.

*Bonus points: this bears a striking resemblance to my favorite definition of mathematics, “the minimum environment to preserve ideas”