It seems true to me that you have to eliminate more than you add in order to get to where you want go.
Or said differently, get down as close to ground level of the ‘thing’ it is you want to do or manage to do.
The best running I’ve done in my running life was last summer, 2024. I set out to run the straight-line distance from our house in Black Mountain to Sadie’s parents house in Albany, Oregon in 6 months.
2,219.93 miles.
I wasn’t physically running there, just running that distance in that amount of time.
This came out to 12.06 miles per day.
It was an incredibly ambitious thing to try, but less so if I managed to pare down my inputs and outputs, generally, so that running 12.06 miles per day was like my main focus.
I stopped the project on September 27, 2024, the day Hurricane Helene happened and really shook up our lives. But! before that, and hear this knowing that I know I’m excusing myself to a degree, I dig remarkably better than I think I would’ve expected if I had been an impartial observer of myself.
Between July 1 – September 27, 2024 (day I started to last day) i ran 877.30 miles.
That’s 9.86 miles per day.
The only way that’s possible, looking back, is that I managed to pare down my inputs and my outputs.
I don’t offer these numbers to gloat, though ego is absolutely involved in trying to do something like this.
I offer specifics because in order to do any significant thing, it just seems like it’s more about what you don’t do rather than what you do do.
Great artists, musicians, writers, or the ones I hear stories about anyways, tend to have some narrative that follows them around which goes something like:
Yes, he was unwilling to do anything other than write from 6am – 11am every day in the same spot under the same conditions.
Yes, she painted the same bowl 12,000 times before painting The Great Bowl as we know it.
Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific (and best I think it’s said) mathematicians in the world may be one of the most ruthless examples of this.
It’s said he didn’t know how to operate basic household machines, like laundry, because it had nothing to do with making progress in math.
I have not, and don’t imagine I will, optimize this ruthlessly because I have other priorities I’m unwilling to be back at such as being a good father and husband, and keeping the grass cut.
But, for there to be people who can be good at some things – and I would count my running 15 miles a day for 89 days in the good category (even good is a stretch – it mostly just is) – there must be these sort of Erdos examples that show you how much further the line is ahead of you so that you can measure where your own line is and go from there.
Again, less might really be more.
Tough stuff, I’d say. Worth doing though.
And don’t mistake prolific for being a paradox of what I’m saying. I.e., they’re doing a lot, therefore there aren’t eliminating in order to do the thing well.
They are typical just being prolific in one vector which is what makes then good examples of people who have eliminated very much in fact.
The Grateful Dead are another good example. At their height, they were playing somewhere close to 100 shows a year.
Every third day, they moved tons of equipment from city to city to play a show that lasted hours.
Elon Musk’s manufacturing algorithm – delete and then add back – also comes to mind.
You could reject this and choose to do lots of things.
A different choice – and the one that gives you the chance to do something well – is to eliminate as much as you can and then focus very closely on the thing you’re interested in.
Get as close to ground level as you can and then be prolific.
the first version of this post used these numbers, which are incorrect. i got them from my strava data which exports in KM, not miles, so what ChatGPT gave me was technically correct, just not directionally correct. apologies!
Between July 1 – September 27, 2024 (day I started to last day) I ran 1,411.87 miles.
That’s 15.86 miles per day.
These numbers are wrong and the correct numbers are in the post.