Origins

Let’s start with two things: what it is, and where it comes from.


If there is one thing that we can say about the phrase simple is beautiful, it is that it practices what it preaches. It consists of a mere three words that come packaged with layers of insight behind them. Simple is beautiful is, in fact, both simple and beautiful.


I remember thinking exactly this the first time I came across it. I couldn’t help but notice that it was a perfect condensation of something I’d been discovering about communication: while we think that ‘more’ enhances our messages, more often than not it distracts instead.


We fall into this trap frequently, shooting to make our ideas as clear as possible by layering in as much detail as we can. Yet in the process, we often lose the message we were trying to convey in the first place. Sometimes (if not most times), I thought, we’d be better off just getting to the damn point.


And if we look throughout history, there is a lot to suggest that this is true. As an idea, “simple is beautiful” has gained centuries worth of staying power - we can find it encapsulated in various forms, from mental models (eg: Occam’s Razor - the simplest reason is the likeliest reason) to pithy principles (eg: KISS - keep it simple, stupid) and even in quotes from the society’s greats (eg: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” - Leonardo da Vinci, 1452).


We’ve seen its lessons represented for so long and in so many different ways that we can say the idea itself is “lindy” - its life expectancy for the future must be especially long, if only as a result of its endurance to this point in time. Endurance begets more endurance.


Yet phrases only persist through time if their words carry an underlying truth within them. The ones that do not quickly become lost to the sands of time. And in the case of simple is beautiful, that truth is an antidote to a common flaw humans possess: by nature, we love to overcomplicate things. Turning a simple, easily understood idea into something overly complex seems to be intrinsic to who we are as a species, almost as if it is written into our DNA.


But why? Why would a strategy so seemingly inefficient sneak past the filters of evolution? If only the fittest tactics are meant to make it through, how did this one survive?


For a simple reason that has been, is, and always will be true: because complexity makes us sound smart. Or at least so we think.


We rationalize it like this: the more profound an explanation we can give, the more we must know about a given topic. And thus the smarter we are. The ability to dive into the nuances of a topic is like a badge of honor, a bragging right to be waved around in the face of others to inflate our self-esteem. Whether right or wrong, knowledge is often the bar by which we measure ourselves against everyone else.


Unfortunately, the world frequently rewards this strategy. Businesses dress up their internal processes in fancy language. Professors scribble red all over our papers demanding more detail. Theses balloon to 300+ pages long. The scientific community is perhaps the worst offender - when is the last time you came across a research paper written for the average person to understand? One that wasn’t wrapped up in wording only those with PHDs can understand?


But while we strive for knowledge of the details, there is a curse that comes alongside them: the more we know - and the more we share - the less we are heard. As we layer in increasing amounts of detail, the core of the idea we were attempting to communicate in the first place tends to become obscured by other non-relevant facts. We take our listeners on a zig-zagged path to understanding, exhausting them along the way. And as we lose the forrest for the trees, our audience quickly follows suit.


Given this context, “simple is beautiful” is fantastic advice. Listening to its words protects us from ourselves - we avoid our biases for complexity by staying as far away from it as possible. The phrase becomes a razor with which we can out the truth of our message, and package it in a way our audience can understand.


But underlying all this is a catch-22: a phrase can be simple, but that says absolutely nothing about whether or not it is worth a damn.


Simple means nothing if it is not valuable. And in our never-ending quest to condense from complexity, we often strip out the detail that made the idea matter in the first place.


A simple idea that is useless - perhaps unsurprisingly - is still useless.


We are not looking for simple at the expense of utility. We are looking for something much better instead.

Lessons from Design

What we are searching for is not a singular end point, but rather a balance. We don’t want simplicity for simplicity’s sake. Instead, we want profound simplicity - an idea that is simple in its presentation yet powerful in its impact.

One without the other is no good. A powerful yet overly complex idea risks losing its message in translation; but a simple idea with no usefulness isn’t worth translating at all.


This balance can be difficult to strike, but there is a path. And if we look for the world to give us a blueprint for doing so, we find that there are few better equipped to show us the way than the domain of design.

A Golden Era - The Romans

A juxtaposition between past and present experiences helped this concept click for me.


During the fall of my junior year in college, I studied abroad in Rome. It was a transcendent and perspective altering experience, among the most enjoyable 5 months of my life. Over the course of that semester, I learned a great number of things - about culture, about language, about the world. But I learned even more about beauty.


Few things will teach you about the concept like living amongst it every day.


Every corner you turn in Rome is an opportunity for your breath to be taken away. The sunset view from atop Aventine Hill. The winding streets of Trastevere. The golden dome of St. Peter’s, and the frescas that adorn its insides. Each representative - yet by no means exhaustive - of the beauty around you at every second.

The level of detail through the city is astounding. You can spend hours exploring but one masterpiece and still leave feeling as if there is more to uncover. So much so that I suppose the same logic could be applied to the city itself - even after 5 months in Rome, I left with the feeling that I had only just begun uncovering its secrets.


Yet while the artistry is robust everywhere you look, all of that beauty comes packaged with an accompanying simplicity. Each piece has a core idea behind it: its function.


Take St. Peter’s, as an example - even amidst all its magnificence, it is still but a church. Its adornments and detail mean naught if its form does not allow it to serve as a place of worship. Or consider Ponte Sant’Angelo, the bridge that spans the Tiber to connect the city center and Castel San’Angelo. The angels that accent its railing are merely an enhancement to the bridge’s true function - a walkway pedestrians can traverse from one side of the river to the other.


Each work of Roman art or architecture has a true purpose, one that most frequently relates to the functional role it is meant to play. But what makes the city especially unique is that that function of each work - the churches meant for worship, the bridges meant to be walked - is enhanced by its form. The details added in each - paintings, statues, carvings, and the like - do not distract from the core message. Instead, they amplify it - creating something both unique and marvelous in the process.


There are millions of churches around the world, yet there is only one St. Peters. Millions of bridges, but only one Ponte Sant’Angelo. Millions of estates, but only one Villa Borghese. Millions of statues, but only one Pietà.


You get the point. The power in the Roman design philosophy is that they found a path to making everything with a simple function exceptionally beautiful at the same time.


But it seems this is a lesson we have long since forgotten.

Modern Regression

Contrast Roman design with that of the modern era, and you will quickly see the perils of taking simplicity too far.


If we were to think of design philosophy as a sliding scale, the Roman and modern approaches would be found at opposite ends. Where the Romans sought to enhance function through form - using detail to amplify the core of the message - our modern design philosophies do the opposite. We now bias towards function at all costs, often leaving form to the wayside. We opt for simple - for useful - but at the expense of beautiful.


You can see this in virtually every modern design avenue you choose to look at. From bathroom designs to doorknobs and even to corporate logos, everything is starting to resemble everything else. Function is being preserved - buildings still remain standing, elevators still go up and down, doors still open - but there is something that has been lost in the process. The world is becoming simpler and ever more functional, but only by trading off against the details that bring it to life.

The result is an amalgamation of sameness, such that everything comes to resemble everything else. Uniqueness - the trait that truly makes something memorable - is being eroded along the way.


Why has this happened? While I can’t say with certainty, I do have a theory. My best guess is that this is the long tail result of living in an era of excess and abundance. Today’s world is one of ‘stuff’ - such that we are accumulating more of it than ever before. Whether in the physical or digital domains, our closets are increasingly becoming filled to the brim.


It appears that many of us share the intuition that this is not the way to live, as if there is a failsafe built into our human operating systems by evolution. We know this can’t be natural, because in the story of history, the world has existed in a state of scarcity for much longer than it has existed in one of abundance.


And so, we look for a way to fight back. As the complexity around us expands, we find safe harbor in simplicity. Increasingly, our response to a maximal world is to counteract it with minimalism - in our words, our furniture, our architecture, and more.


Simple becomes the ultimate prize. We care not how we get there, only that we do. We reduce at all costs, stripping away the details in the hopes that we can save both time and energy. We search for the simplest explanation to a question, the simplest representation of an idea.


As a result, society has become ever more functional. Ever more efficient. But in doing so, we are left to wonder - where are our modern St. Peter’s, our creations that deliver on their necessary function but only when packaged with a staggering amount of beauty?


The answer: they don’t exist. Because in our never-ending quest for simplicity, we have lost a bit of ourselves along the way.

Caution Signs

Okay, but what does all of this mean in regards to communicating our ideas?


To make your ideas stand out - yes, by all means make sure that they are simple. Too many throughout history have utilized simplicity as a razor for us to disregard its worth. But recognize that your ideas must be beautiful, too; that the simplicity of an idea says nothing about its value; that simple is no guarantee of beautiful.


Here, it is important to recognize a few things that simple is not, so that we may better understand what it is. Simple does not merely mean “saying something short”, nor does it suggest we are looking for “easy words”. It is not sound bites or value statements, nor the most dumbed down version of an idea we can find.


Instead, simple is about density. About elegance compressed into a small package, a tiny phrase that carries with it a heavy weight. Simple is a stick of dynamite - something small and compact yet brimming with an explosive energy, a powerful truth.


This is our goal when we communicate an idea - to find the equilibrium between simplicity and complexity. We must find the core of the idea and represent it in a way that is both simple and beautiful.


To do so requires a finely tuned scalpel, like a sculptor crafting a masterpiece from a block of marble. We start with a big slab of rock - a rough idea - and begin to chisel away, lopping off pieces with an end in mind. We prioritize and eliminate, choosing what deserves to stay to make our point, and that which should be cast to the cutting room floor.


But as we get closer to finish, to that end state of our compressed idea, we need be wary of stripping away what makes it unique in the first place. As we’ve seen, it is far to easy to aim for simple and wind up with bland instead. So where reduction was our friend at the start, we must swap it for preservation as we near the end. The more our idea starts to crystalize, the more we must make sure we preserve that which makes it unique.


Here, we would be wise to borrow some advice from history. Consider the following quotes, both reminders of the tightrope we are trying to walk:

• “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” - Albert Einstein
  

• “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (French aviator)

Each gets at the ultimate point: you must know how much of an idea can be stripped away before it starts to lose its essence; the point at which simplicity starts to rob of us beauty. And make no mistake - it will, if we are not careful. Ideas can quickly go from complex and useful to simple but useless, in but the snap of a finger.


Neither is preferable. Again, balance is our goal. The quest for simplicity should not stop us from striving for beauty as well. The two are meant to exist in harmony, such that neither takes precedence at the expense of the other.


Succinct enough to be finishable, yet distinct enough to be memorable. That is the destination.


So how do we get there?

Roadmap

To find the balance we seek, it can be helpful to think of communication as a checklist - one with three steps, and an order of operations:

1. Discover (Find the idea you wish to communicate)
   

2. Distill (Strip it down to its most essential form)
   

3. Detail (Preserve and enhance its soul through the fine lining that brings it to life)
   

   

Discover

Step 1 is intuitive: discover. We start by identifying the idea we wish to communicate, like a sculptor looking for the right piece of marble with which to work. Crafting a masterpiece necessitates high quality stone, and only once we have selected the proper materials can the art begin.


So we kick off our journey with a process of exploration, shifting through our options to find the ones worthy of attention and care. To do so necessitates getting comfortable with exclusion, to use it as our friend. Counterintuitively, discovery is as much about what we choose not to work with as it is about what we do.


To help with getting started, I like to ask a simple question - one I find carries equal value regardless of the setting:

• What single idea is giving you the most energy right now, the thing that you cannot stop thinking about?

The rationale is simple: if there is something that keeps consuming your mind, taking your thoughts along with it at a whim, there is likely a powerful truth underneath it waiting to be uncovered. Rather than fighting against your subconscious, it is best to lean in. After all, if something captures your attention it is likely that it will capture that of others as well.


The answer to this question serves as your starting material - the right block of marble ready to have the statue waiting within it unveiled. And now that we have something worth saying in the first place, the real work can begin.

Distill

With an idea in hand, we now look to bring it to life. And to do so requires moving to step 2: distill.

It is here where we shift from excavator to sculptor, where we exchange our shovel for a scalpel. With a new tool in hand, we begin the process of chiseling away at our idea by using simplicity as a our guide. We search for the essence of the idea - the single kernel of truth that packs with it the most powerful punch, the one thing worth remembering above all else.


Here, we are searching for simple - and finding it requires but a single question:

• If you could only leave one thing about your idea planted in someone’s mind after experiencing it, what do you wish it to be?
  
  

Why is this all we need? Because when we identify what is essential to an idea - the one primary thing - we naturally uncover what is non-essential as well. These are two sides of the same coin: knowledge of one tells us a great deal about the other.


Here again, exclusion comes in useful. The challenge of finding the core idea lies in the fact that this idea is singular, not plural. There can only be one core idea, in the same way that there can only be one ‘North Star’ or one ‘most important goal’. And as such, a conflict of interest comes to light: we must take the leap to toss out the important ideas that simply aren’t the most important. As the popular piece of writing advice goes, we must ‘kill our darlings’.


Our goal here is thus two-fold: we must preserve the core component of our idea while discarding the scraps. In stripping away the pieces of marble not meant to be part of the final statue, we in turn better highlight that which remains.


Upon doing so, we have taken a bigger idea and brought it’s core insight to light, chiseling away to find it’s ultimate shape. But we are not done yet - we have crafted something simple, certainly, but perhaps not something beautiful.


If we are to accomplish both, there is one step that remains.

Detail

Imagine if Michaelangelo had carved but the shape of The David, quitting before adding the details that bring it to life - the curls of hair on its head, the chiseled physique, the sling that slayed Goliath resting in its left hand. Would we consider it the masterpiece we do today if he had?


No, of course not. Because it is the details that most bring The David to life - without them it is merely a statue, rather than a masterpiece.


The same can be said for ideas, our messages, our words. It is in this stage - in the detailing - where they truly begin to shine. Because while simple may be found in the core, beautiful lies in the details.


See, ideas are like seeds - small packages that contain the potential for something great within them. But they are incapable of reaching their grandest visions on their own - without the proper nutrients, they are destined to fall short of what they are capable of becoming.


Details are the nourishment our ideas need to become the best versions of themselves. They help the core of a message grow into something great, providing the appropriate resources to support its growth along the way.


The key word here is appropriate. Just like carefully tending to a plant in the garden, our goal is to strike a balance between under-nourished and over-nourished. Between too little detail and too much. We want to find the right amount of support for our ideas to give them the backing they need, but not so much to distract from the main message we want to convey.


And so here, let me provide two more lines of questioning worth considering as it relates to detailing our ideas:

1. Does you idea feel bland, like it has a function but lacks a soul? Does it require slightly more context, a few more lines and a little more shading to bring its message to light?
   
   

2. Does your idea feel too vibrant, like its soul is on display so much that it is distracting from the main message? What details can you strip away to balance the scale towards simplicity?
   
   

These questions serve as counterbalances to each other, helping us walk the line between too simple and too complex. Between bland and beautiful. When answered in tandem like a back and forth tug of way, they help us find that spot that is ‘just right’ - where we have detailed our idea just enough to bring it to life, but not so much that we have lost it’s core along the way.


With the answer to both in hand, they help us carve a path to something that is both simple and beautiful.

Fin

And so, let us close with this.


As you look around at the world, start to pay attention to the dichotomies that exist between function and form, between structure and soul. Between simplicity and beauty.


Ask yourself the following question: is simple truly beautiful? Are the two in fact one and the same? Or is there something missing from that statement, such that you can very easily have one without the other?


The more you pay attention, the more I believe you will recognize this powerful truth: simple can be beautiful, but it is in fact no guarantee.


We have taken the phrase too far. Too often we are biasing towards less in our words, our ideas - taking the short cut in presentation of a message in the name of the holy grail of simplicity. The result is the world we live in today - one that is has become ever more functional, but only at the expense of its soul.


Know that there is a better way, an alternate reality where the two concepts dance together rather than apart. A world in which we can create simple things that resonate precisely because they are beautiful as well.


History has shown us that one need not take precedence at the expense of the other. Simple and beautiful is the goal.


And in that simple rephrasing lies all the difference.

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When a publicly traded company earns a profit, it also earns a decision.

There are two routes frequently taken: reinvest the profit back into the business (called retained earnings), or distribute that money to its shareholders. The later is called a dividend, and we can think of this as an outsourcing of that initial decision to the consumer. The power to take the money out or put it back in now lies in their hands.

To investors, dividends are a choice with a dollar tag: to reap the rewards as they stand, or to reinvest them with the hope they compound into the future. And since each decision comes with an associated price, the tradeoffs are easily quantifiable via dollars and cents.

So, let’s add some context with a quick thought experiment. Consider an initial investment in an S&P 500 ETF, and say it comes with relatively standard returns (~6.5% YOY adjusted for inflation) and dividends (~2% payout, quarterly). For a round number, say we start with $10K. Let’s look at what the difference is between re-investing those dividends back into the stock after each pay-out vs. withdrawing the cold, hard cash:

At the tail end, a $150k gulf forms between the two strategies. Not only does reinvestment outperform withdrawal at the end point, but it also outpaces at each step along the way. The gap grows exponentially larger as time - and compounding - work their magic.

Winning strategy, resoundingly clear.

So why don’t we think about acquiring knowledge in the same way?

Intellectual Dividends

Dividends are a powerful analogy when extended to the domain of knowledge acquisition and personal growth.

In finance, we can think of them as a reward paid out to shareholders for their investment. You put dollars behind a company you believe to be of high quality, and - if your bet is correct - the company rewards you for your show of faith with a payout of either cash or stock.

Learning works in a similar fashion, with analogous inputs and outputs. You invest your time and energy (capital) into a source of information (company) and get rewarded with some form of acquired knowledge (dividend).

Financial Dividends, meet Intellectual Dividends.

But how can we acquire the dividends in the first place? Here, it is useful to look through the lens of the financial markets. And when we do, a simple yet instructive truth emerges: bad companies rarely pay out good dividends.

This is because dividends are a sign of underlying business health: you cannot pay out your shareholders with money that you do not have; the capital must come from somewhere. That somewhere is oftentimes called ‘profit’, which tends to be generated by strong underlying business fundamentals. We can thus think of dividends as a positive indicator for a good company, and to obtain them requires you invest in businesses capable of producing them.

Similarly, in the domain of knowledge, intellectual dividends are an indicator for the underlying quality of the content from which they come. The higher the signal of the information, the more you will get paid out in return.

But as in the financial markets, existence is no guarantee for value. There are thousands of companies that investors would be best served avoiding, and content is no different. In the grand scheme of information, there are few sources that possess the fundamentals capable of returning intellectual dividends back to you. Most offer the illusion of returns by promising us signal, yet in the end only give us noise.

So we must do the work to find them, recognizing that intellectual dividends will not magically appear without effort.

And once we do, we earn ourselves a decision: withdraw, or invest?

Tangibility

As in our example from above, the optimal scenario is clear.

Like in finance, the ultimate power of knowledge acquisition lies in playing the long game. The more we acquire - and the more we reinvest - the greater the compounding we will see.

The key to unlocking compounding growth from intellectual dividends lies in application. We must take the knowledge we acquire and put it to work. This is the point of continuous learning - not to acquire knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but rather to apply it in a way such that it solidifies into wisdom.

Yet we don’t often perceive the process of learning in this way; perhaps 10% of what we learn gets applied, if we are lucky. That is because a clear distinction exists between the nature of the returns in the two domains: whereas financial dividends are tangible, intellectual dividends are often the exact opposite: intangible.

Unlike in finance where we can put a clear, objective ‘price tag’ on our returns, the rewards that come from the acquisition of new knowledge are harder to pin down. Learning as a process is highly abstract - it is difficult to know both when the payout comes and what form it takes. Is it once we finish the book or article? After we’ve taken a test or passed a certification? Hard to say.

As a result, we often fail to grasp what we are being paid out as a result of our investment into a resource. And if we don’t know what it is we are taking away, then the process of putting it back in - of reinvesting - becomes exponentially harder.

This is most commonly where we fall short in our processes of learning - not in the initial investment, but in what we do with the returns.

We have our withdrawals set up on auto-pilot, causing us to miss out on the long term compounding effects that arise from application. Rather than reinvesting acquired knowledge, we push it deep into the confines of our mental filing cabinets knowing we are unlikely to ever bring it back into the light. We read, listen, and converse - only to let what we’ve gained slip away.

We are passively investing our attention, hoping that our energy expenditure on the front end is enough to reap the rewards on the backend. But it is not. Unlike their financial parallels, intellectual dividends do not function in a ‘set it and forget it’ type manner. There is no equivalent in the pursuit of knowledge to the up-front, automatic reinvestment strategy you might find in your favorite brokerage app.

Instead, it requires a fundamentally active commitment to reinvesting acquired knowledge for gain. Without an emphasis on application, the gap between what you do have and what you could have grows.

The key to bringing back more from our intellectual pursuits thus lies in recognition that our ROI is directly correlated with our effort.

The more we work to apply the insights we gain, the more tangible our intellectual dividends become.

Application: Making the Intangible Tangible

So, if our ability to maximize the returns on our intellectual pursuits requires moving from intangible to tangible, from consumption to application, then what does this looks like in practice?

Here, optionality is our friend. There are a number of routes we can travel that allow for us to capture the power of the compounding curve. But I find three specific ones to be most powerful - creating, teaching, and connecting.

1. Create

An area where schools have gotten it right, project based learning has long been used as a mechanism through which to solidify knowledge. Why? Because a concrete deliverable serves as a forcing function for making ideas tangible; it gives one the immediate opportunity to apply - to re-invest - the information you acquire (this is in fact the rationale for this Substack).

What this looks like can take many forms - you can tweet lessons, riff longform on ideas, design a visual, build a product, and much more. Each gives you an opportunity to remix and refine your original idea. Each forces you take an abstract thought and bring it to life.

The point is not what you create so much as the fact that you do. That you take a blueprint and turn it into a house. The more we create, the more we build, the more solidified our foundation of understanding becomes.

2. Teach

There is an old maxim: You haven’t taught until they have learned. In the domain of intellectual dividends, the reverse is true as well: you haven’t learned until you have taught.

Teaching is a powerful lever for understanding as it forces you to understand the idea at a fundamental level. When the goal is to be understood rather than heard, refinement becomes paramount. You must strip away the noise, condensing your thought into a densely packaged idea for your audience.

So to start, find someone you can use as a sounding board; someone willing to be the student for your ideas (apologies to my wife for frequently filling this role for me). And for a helpful framework, try borrowing from the Fenyman Technique: Select your content; teach it to a child; refine your understanding; and then pay attention to the results.

Read to acquire. Teach to solidify.

3. Connect

The world does not exist as a combination of siloes. Instead, it is an interconnected web of domains, a puzzle made of overlapping pieces that come together to form the whole.

Knowledge works in the same way. An idea from one domain can - and most likely will - carry weight when applied to another. True wisdom thus does not exist as isolated facts, but instead lies in the connections between them.

And so, a third powerful strategy for applying acquired learnings is to find connections; to take one idea and fuse it with another. Rather than building something new, here we instead look to blend it with that which we already know.

We can think of this strategy as re-investing our dividends into a new company - putting them to work in a slightly different way by attempting to bridge gaps across domains. We do so by looking for transferable concepts, principles from one domain that can easily apply to another. By identifying the similarities that underly two concepts, we can create a bridge between them. We can reason by analogy.

This piece itself serves as an example. It is a connection drawn between two domains, between finance and knowledge. The ‘dividend’ serves as common link between the two, an analogy that bridges our understanding of two seemingly distinct concepts, solidifying our understanding of both in the process.

Connecting concepts thus reinforces the strength of each idea, making each anchor point stronger together than either could be on their own. So to further buttress your ideas, look for the opportunities to build bridges between them.

Which path you choose to follow matters little - there is no ‘best strategy’, only what is best for you. But the point remains: reinvesting your intellectual dividends requires focused action, an intent to take the knowledge you have built and make it tangible through application.

We must take action, start putting one foot in front of the other. Applying one thing at a time. Yet taking the steps is not always easy - even once we know exactly where we must go. Sometimes, like a prize horse in a derby, we need a spur to jolt us forward.

Rules

Practical frameworks give us an excellent starting point but are no guarantee we will cross the finish line. What we do in between is what determines the outcome of the race.

Oftentimes, there is a barrier that exists to creating forward momentum; an activation energy that must be overcome. That barrier arises as a function of choice - the more we give ourselves, the easier it is for us to find a way out. To skip the follow through and move on to something else.

So in order to ensure our intellectual dividends are reinvested, we must account for our natural human tendency to eschew the current thing for the new one; to fall short of application out of a desire to find what is next. To do so, we can tap into the power of constraints.

Constraints - or rules - create structure. And all good endeavors need them. Their presence clearly defines the boundaries within which we operate, and thus the game we play.

Constraint begets action. A shot clock spurs a shot. A play clock spurs a snap. A pitch clock spurs a pitch. The more confined our options become, the more the path towards action crystalizes.

In the same way, we can implement rules that force us to action when combined with our frameworks. Here are two of my favorites:

The 24 Hour Rule

Too often, we allow ourselves lag time in applying the knowledge we have acquired. We learn something and ‘let it sit’, only for the thought to lose it’s sharpness. As a result, its clarity erodes along with the sands of time.

A simple rule to counteract this: put a time cap on applying your new knowledge. Within 24 hours, require yourself to act on that information in some manner.

Create something. Teach something. Connect something. Again, how exactly you do so can vary. The goal is to constrain the time, not the medium. But whatever it is you choose to do, force yourself to do it quickly. The longer you wait, the less you will apply.

Implement a Consistent Review Process

A second favorite rule it so implement a consistent, replicable review system that forces you to revisit the information you have consumed.

Doing so ensures that you are not engaging in ‘drive-by-learning’, skimming and scanning as much as possible and eschewing any form of depth. The more you review, and the more regimented the time intervals on which you do so, the more solidified your knowledge will become.

To share what this looks like in practice, this is the logic that underpins two of the series I write - my Book Notes and What I Read This Week. Each operates around a hard and fast rule that forces me to re-engage with the content I have consumed, so that I may extract information from them and reinvest it back into my work. The two rules:

• No new books started until a Book Notes article is written and published on the most recent one.

• No new digital content consumed until I have published a ‘What I Read This Week’ article oriented around the information read the week prior.

These rules are designed for biases I’ve uncovered in my consumption habits - specifically a tendency to want to move onto the next piece of information without properly digesting the prior one.

Yours process likely will - and should - look different. But the more you mandate a review process, the more you will get in return.

Closing Thoughts

Some final thoughts to take us home.

By thinking of knowledge acquisition in a similar manner to financial dividends, we gain a more principled understanding of both how to acquire and apply our learnings.

The first step is to do the work to generate an intellectual profit. We can spend a great deal of time discussing what to do with our intellectual dividends, but the point is moot if we are not acquiring them in the first place. Just like financial dividends are a sign of a health company creating value, intellectual dividends are a sign of the health of your knowledge acquisition strategy. The higher the quality of the information you consume, the more you will get paid out.

Once you have acquired an insight, make sure you put it back to work. It is here where most of us fall short, withdrawing our profits on autopilot without any idea of where we might better leverage them. We consume and consume, never shifting from knowledge to wisdom via application. And in doing so, we watch the wave of compounding ride away without us on it.

The more we apply, the more we get in return. When we take our intellectual dividends and reinvest them - whether through building, teaching, or connecting - our knowledge solidifies, forming a foundation upon which we can build.

Yet while financial dividends serve as a useful analogy to help us contextualize the process of learning, the returns we earn from reinvesting in companies pale in comparison to the ones we earn from reinvesting in ourselves. When you consider that knowledge acquisition never stops, you recognize that intellectual payouts come at a frequency that their financial parallels never could. We shift from quarterly dividends to daily ones, earning a payout each time we choose to tap into the power of reapplication.

And the more frequent the payouts, the faster the compounding rate becomes. Intellectual dividends quickly come to far outstrip anything we could do with our financial ones.

So make the choice to move from passive to active, from intangible to tangible. Read, listen, learn. And most importantly, apply. Take your intellectual dividends and reinvest them back into yourself.

And watch as compounding brings you along for the ride.

“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”.

A powerful phrase, but a half truth in the context of our hyper-digitized world. In a world where our relationships have transcended from physical to digital, we are now connecting with much more than just people.

The truth today is that every piece of content we interact with shapes our perspectives, like a sculptor chiseling away at stone.

So let us rephrase our quote to something more appropriate. We are no longer just the average of the people around us. Instead, we are the mean of everything we spend our time with - what we read, what we hear, what we write. All of it.

Mathematics tells us that the only way to change the output is to change the inputs. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. And so, the path to finding a better average - a better us - lies through a more careful cultivation of what we allow in. The information vying to shape our minds.

In The Philosophy of Focus, I laid out the principles for how I think about finding focus in our modern world. So now, let us move from the abstract to the tangible. From theory to practice.

This is my blueprint for designing a system to find focus and take control of my attention in a world looking to strip it away.

1. Define

When it comes to my focus system, questions lie at the foundation.

In the Game of Attention, moving beyond the ‘Start’ square requires defining what these look like for you. You must find your ‘Favorite Problems’, the questions and interests that light the fire of your curiosity. And while this process is highly individual, there is a consistent roadmap to follow.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it starts with questions. Questions that in turn beget more questions.

The power of your favorite problems is that they have likely stayed consistent over time. They are the common threads that unify your life experiences, the consistent themes that show up at each turn along the way.

So the first step to finding them is to look in the rearview towards and ask yourself about the story of your life. With the right questions, you can’t help but notice the themes that have organized your experiences. Here are a couple to start:

• What were you obsessed with as a child? What could you not get enough of such that every waking moment of the day you were watching, talking, reading, or exploring this subject?

• What looks like work to others but feels like play to you? What are the things others might think you crazy for being obsessed with but that you cannot stop thinking about?

• Are there patterns that exist in your past with subjects or questions you have consistently come back to at multiple points in time? Ones where interest ebs and flows, but where the passion inevitably returns time and time again?

A reminder as you go through this process: these questions are yours, and yours alone. As such, there is no ‘correct’ response; each of us will find different answers to the same questions. That is the point. A natural divide will form between those areas driving your interest and those that do not. Let it happen - attune to the differences so you know where investing your attention will provide the greatest returns.

This process of up-front definition is iterative; you’ll likely need to start broad and work towards narrow. Get as many ideas on paper as possible first, and then borrow some advice from the writing industry: kill your darlings. Be willing to remove the questions you like so that you can more deeply focus on the questions you love.

To contextualize what this looks like in practice, a personal experience. When I first went through the exercise, I had 20+ questions written down - each vaguely interesting in some way. But after squaring each up against the others, like a 1 v 1 battle royale, 10 ‘victors’ emerged. When each was put side-by-side, the hierarchy of interest emerged quite naturally.

You’ll notice that these questions are inherently open-ended. For each item on the list, there is no singular answer that can satisfy it. This is by design - your questions should resemble maps more so than they do blueprints. Rather than outlining the exacting detail up front, the goal is to provide a rough sketch, a general outline. In doing so, your questions will then invite you on a journey of exploration to fill in the details between the lines.

2. Distill

Definition is step one, but as we’ve discussed the true value of filters lies in their simplicity. And we aren’t quite there yet.

In current form, our questions aren’t exactly practical. We are humans, after all, and long sentences simply take up too much space. Without the next step - distillation - our questions are bound to fail when put to the test of the reality. Because in order to use them, we have to remember them.

So once your filters are clearly defined, it is time to tap into the power of reduction.

You’ll notice your questions are likely subsets of some specific themes in the world, like pieces you fit together to bring a puzzle to life. The more you connect, the clearer the picture becomes.

The inverse is true here as well - the clearer our vision of the big picture, the more likely we are to understand both where the pieces go and how they fit together. There is a reason we use the top of the box as a guide when putting a puzzle together - without it, we’d hardly know where to start.

So when it comes to your questions, try to zoom out to think about the end state. What specific theme or domain does each question map to? What bigger puzzle will they help you put together?

Whatever these answers are, use them as a razor to cut away the fluff; to move from complex to simple. Take your questions from long phrases to singular words. Reduce them to their broader themes and recognize that in studying those areas deeply, the answers you seek are likely to emerge.

A look at this process in practice, from my own experience. 219 words turned into 14:

The simplicity that emerges from distillation is freeing; the complexity disappears, and along with it so too does the strain. What we are left with is clarity - simple, memorable themes around which we can orient our focus.

Less, that we can now do better.

3. Apply

With our filters both defined as questions and reduced to their underlying themes, we are now set up to leverage them in the domain of application.

As you start to put your filters to the test, you will observe a natural attunement process taking shape. Like a metal detector revealing hidden treasures underground, your questions will start to steer you towards the information likely to hold the answers you seek.

Over time with practice, your filters will become internalized. The more you use them, the more natural the process will be. Your focus will innately gravitate towards what is you want to be pursuing, and away from that which you wish to avoid. It will take time - and repetition - but that day will come.

But until it does, there are strategies we can use in the short term to speed up this process and better extract value from our filters.

The Content Audit

Let’s talk about one of my favorites, what I call ‘The Content Audit’.

The Content Audit is something I’ve started doing on a yearly basis and found immense value in. It involves taking a look at the various platforms on which I consume information and assessing what I am reading against my pre-defined filters. For me, this mostly involves two locations: my Twitter account and my Readwise Reader app (where most of my newsletter/email subscriptions feed into).

Using Twitter as an example, I start the audit by adding every account I follow into a Notion document and assign them tags based off of my filters. I then group them by specific categories, which allows me to quickly identify both magnitude (ie the total number of accounts I’m following for knowledge acquisition) and distribution (ie how many are in each theme).

Laying your content streams out like this can provide some staggering insights. For example, my 2023 Content Audit revealed that I was following 63 crypto focused accounts - thought leaders, builders, founders, and the like. While this is a subject matter I’m intensely interested in, seeing that number was surprising - especially when squared up against the frequencies of other categories. My content environment have become heavily skewed in a way that was out of alignment with where I wanted to be. More noise, less signal.

But where did this skewness come from? There is a simple explanation for me: content follows the laws of entropy. Without guardrails in place to curtail it, the disorder of the content landscape always trends towards more chaos. I had left my content diet unchecked for a while, and it had taken on a mind of its own. The Content Audit helped me reign it back in.

For this reason, I’ve found the Content Audit to be best utilized on a yearly cadence, such that you are constantly stepping in to constrain the entropy of your information environment. It is not a set it and forget it type strategy. Like a garden, your content environment requires constant upkeep. The more time you spend in it trimming and cutting, the more beautiful it well become.

Scientists, Not Chauffeurs

Once you identify your content distribution - the areas in which you are either over or under indexed - the final step is create balance. A helpful thought experiment can help here, one I call ‘Scientists, Not Chauffeurs’.

The model is borrowed from the story of Max Planck - the Nobel Prize winning physicist - and his chauffeur, who after hearing Planck’s talk on quantum mechanics so many times once thought he could give it himself. After testing the idea out one evening in Germany, the chauffeur found himself in over his skis. He waltzed through the talk with no issues, but the Q&A session was another beast. He knew the talking points, but not the technical details underpinning them. In the end, he had to request insight from his ‘chauffeur in the audience’ - Max Planck himself.

The lesson here is this: when choosing where your content will come from, find the scientists - not the chauffeurs. Look for the the practitioners, the one that are in the arena accruing the scars of knowledge behind the scenes, and let their hard earned perspectives shape yours.

The reality is that there are many more chauffeurs - people that purport to know - than scientists - those that do. And while history has shown this to be true, it also tells us that but a few scientists can have outsized impact on the world. And the same can be true when it comes to our content.

Here we can borrow a principle from 80/20 thinking - the majority of the value can be derived from a minority of the inputs. There is no need to find 100 scientists for any given domain of interest - a small handful will suffice.

So when defining your input streams, ask yourself a simple question: what small subset of experts can I derive 80-90% of the value from?

A smaller list means less competing voices for your attention. Less but better, yet again.

Final Insights

In a world where every piece of information impacts our thoughts, filters are the path towards freeing our minds from the algorithm’s control. The process for finding them is simple: define your questions; distill them to their essence; apply them to the content you consume.

Once you do so, each filter will serve as a guardrail to constrain the entropy of your content diet, allowing you to create order from a system that bends towards chaos. What they look like are up to you.

But a parting word of advice - strive to find the midpoint between the many and few. It is amidst balance where filters thrive - enough constraint to bolster yourself against the firehose of information, but enough freedom to let your curiosity wander.

Lastly - remember that filters exist to make our lives easier, not harder. The goal is to play a game of minimal effort on the intake, so you can spend more energy thinking, experimenting, and combining the information that makes it through. If you find your new focus system requiring more energy than necessary, it is likely you have taken your filters too far.

Keep it simple. Define your questions. Reduce them to their underlying themes. Apply them to where you source your information.

And you’ll start to see the world in an entirely new light.

1 hour. Evaporated into the ether as if it never existed. 60 minutes. 3600 seconds. 0 value. Talk about bad ROI.

I fall into this trap often. Sucked into endless rabbit holes. Trapped in the cheap dopamine cycle of Tweets and Tik-Toks, Reels and Stories. Washed away by the firehose of information.

And I know I’m not alone.

There is a battle going on today, a hidden one with powerful implications. One stemming from the informational vortex created by our digital world.

It is the fight for our attention, for our focus. For our ability to parse signal from noise.

For the past few years, I’ve been on the journey to regain control over my attention. Searching for strategies to fight back against the information waging war on my mind.

In the process, I’ve tried to carve out some lessons - my ‘philosophy of focus’, if you will. The following is an attempt to distill these insights into a practical roadmap. One that can help us take the power of focus back into our own hands.

Lets start by getting our bearings.

A Battle of Signal and Noise

Today's world is a paradox when placed in the context of human history. Where humans once lived in a world of scarcity, abundance is now the defining trait.

We no longer inhabit the realm of lions and bears. Instead, our modern age is one of bits and bytes Where information once took the form of cave drawings and scrolls, it now lives as electricity - words on a screen, transmitted at the speed of light. The medium has changed.

And as a result, so too has the magnitude. The printing press. The telegraph. The telephone. The internet. Each advancement in technology a new medium for broadcasting the secrets of the world. Each creating compounding effects on the amount of knowledge available in the world. Each amplifying the strain on our attention.

In the digital age, our options are abundant. Yet pitfalls accompany possibilities, and here we find no exception. As the magnitude of information grows, so too do the demands on our abilities to parse it. Content is compounding at a rate that far outstrips our cognitive capabilities, and a confounding problem has emerged as a result.

A story of signal versus noise.

There are a couple of underlying truths here.

First, more information does not equate to more truth. This is is easy to see. Simply watch how the internet turns one story into one hundred. Something happens, people write and report. The spins are all different, but the underlying kernel of truth remains unchanged.

Second, truth is constant. We neither add nor subtract it from the word, nor does it expand alongside the informational vortex in which we live today. Instead, we seek to uncover and bring to light that which already exists.

Put these two together, and the implications are clear: We are living in a world where noise compounds while signal stagnates, making more truth more difficult to uncover than ever.

A challenge arises, born out of a fundamental flaw in human biology: evolution has not shaped our brains to thrive amidst environments of high noise. In the saga of human history, information has been scare for much longer than it has been abundant. We are armed with primitive brains in and advanced world.

And the end result of biology adapted for scarcity in a world of abundance is simple - confusion. We know not where to look, what to pay attention to. The noise grows, a blinding blizzard of information through which we must trek to find signal.

The Illusion of Choice

A paradox is thus at play. The age of infinite information offers endless avenues for attention to pursue. Yet the majority are trap doors, masquerading as friendly bed and breakfasts. 'Come stay a while, and we will satisfy the desires of your heart', they say. Yet we find ourselves emptier upon departure than when we first arrived. They promise us signal, but all we get in return is more noise.

My experiences with cheap dopamine traps have revealed one of the worlds great illusions: while our choices appear infinite, they are in fact the opposite. If we are to get what we want out of our lives, there are only a finite number of roads that we can travel to do so. The set of choices we can make is a much smaller subset of the options afforded to us.

A story from Trevor Moawad, the late mental performance coach, highlights this dichotomy well.

In his book It Takes What it Takes, Moawad discusses the career evolution of Vince Carter. Known as a high flier early on, Carter began to shy away from highlight reel dunks as he aged. His rationale? Age and big dunks do not mix. The older he become, the more strain explosive plays placed on his body. Strain that compounded over the course of a game and the course of a season.

To Carter, each decision to take a lay up over a dunk was representative of the illusion of choice: the options we think we have are not options at all when placed within the context of our goals. Where others saw him making a choice on each breakaway, his choice was already made. He knew that every windmill dunk was a disservice to extending his career. The choice was already made.

Moawad sums up the less he took from Carter well, writing: “Do we have the luxury of choice if excellence is what we aspire to?

The Illusion of Choice helps put the fight for focus into context.

A world full of abundant possibility is also one filled with the illusion of abundant choice. Yet more options do not beget more choices. While the number of things competing for your attention grows, the set of choices consistent with your vision remains constant.

This is the Game of Attention in a nutshell.

The Game of Attention

We play the Game of Attention each day, from the moment we arise to when the lights shut off at night. Every step along the way a decision on where to place our focus. A choice.

In this game, choices determine the answer to the question ‘what am I paying attention to?’. And the response cannot be ‘everything’, else we risk averaging ourselves out to 0. A bi-product of the noise, we pursue everything - and in turn find nothing. We must recognize the illusion of choice at play so that we can take back control of our focus.

And so, let me propose the best antidote I have found, a counter-intuitive red-pill in a world in which we are encouraged at all points to ‘open our minds’: close yours instead. Make a contrarian bet to seal off your attention. Constrict your focus to play a game of filters so that you may re-exert control over the inputs influencing your attention.

The goal here is not to be ‘closed-minded’. Rather, it is to have strong opinions - values, perspectives, guidelines - that are weakly held. Convictions you are constantly squaring against information relevant to those convictions. To take a beginner’s mind to any piece of data that you allow into your mind rather than every piece outside of it.

Richard Feynman's '12 Favorite Problems' model has emerged as one of my favorite strategies for crafting these attention boundaries. A Nobel Prize wining physicist and renowned polymath, Feynman was once asked how he was able to live such a broadly impactful life. His response?:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!

Feynman’s approach to creativity was thus to establish boundaries around his attention - his ‘dozen favorite problems’ - so that he could play with each of them infinitely and in unique ways.

Through this lens, a lesson about closed and open minds take shape. It is not an either or debate, but rather a question of ordering. Close your mind your first, so that you may more readily open it later. The path to focus, to identifying the signal in the world, first requires you to define the signal you wish to pursue so you know in which direction you need look. Identify the questions that pull at your soul, the ones you cannot help but feel the spark of curiosity to pursue, and let them guide you attention like beacons in the night. Find your favorite problems.

And as your focus illuminates new information along the way, open your mind to think like a scientist. Square it against your convictions to help crystalize your understanding of the problem at hand.

There is a catch here: to live the life you want - rather than the one the world wants for you - you must spend time thinking about what these filters look like for you. The questions that light a fire in your soul will be unique. As a full set, your 'twelve problems' cannot possibly be identical to someone else's. You are the only person capable of identifying what it is that draws the best out of you.

The questions we ask ourselves influence the ways in which we see the world - and the power to set these lies within your control. Choose your filters and the path to victory in the war of attention becomes clear.

Choose your filters, take back your life.

Filters at Play

Look around the world at those who have made sense of it, and you will see filtering at play under the surface.

Success leaves clues. And when considering high performers as a set, we find they share many commonalities when it comes to focus . While each of their ideas may be unique, the processes behind them are often more alike than we'd expect.

The closer you look, the more you'll notice the boundaries they place around their attention - guardrails that direct their focus and shape their perspectives.

Whether they recognize it or not, many rely on a singular 'big idea'. It is a lens - a filter - they apply to the world, allowing them to see opportunities hidden to others. To borrow from Charlie Munger, they 'find a simple idea and take it seriously.'

Some examples, to help contextualize this concept:

• Elon Musk has built his companies around a singular question - How do I create a more abundant future for humanity? Tesla, Space X, and even his recent acquisition of Twitter are all downstream of this one big idea.

• Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on the simple principle of improving the customer experience. 30 years later, this filter still directly influences the company’s operation.

• Ray Croc - credited for the globalization of the McDonald's franchise - prioritized a simple, replicable menu. The resulting Dollar Menu became and American icon for years to come.

• Howard Schultz centered Starbucks's first cafes around coffee only, prioritizing the quality of both product and experience. He waited nearly 30 years before adding any food items to the menu.

• Jack Dorsey utilized constraint in designing the initial Twitter platform with a 140 character limit. It took the company 11 years to expand to 280 and beyond.

Notice that while each idea/product/company is different, there is a common thread: less, but better. Each founder made a deliberate choice to create a narrow beam of focus. Like a magnifying glass condensing light into heat, doing so allowed them to direct their full energy at a small subset of problems.

Thus, while filters appear to be about inputs, their true power lies in the domain of expression. The information you attune to will determine the actions you take, the things you build. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. If you want to express in a certain way, then being strategic about your inputs matters.

And so, recognize that the path to creative expression often begins by choosing to study a narrow band of ideas. Determine the subjects where your most powerful inclinations lie and monopolize the insights they provide.

Why Filters Work - Simple Wins

Why do filters work? Why have some of the world’s greatest minds employed them to resounding success? Because in complex environments, simple wins.

Abundant information introduces layers of complexity to our decision making processes. As the noise amplifies, so too must our efforts to parse it.

Amidst these conditions, simplicity serves as a superpower. It allows us to zoom out, to find the details with the highest value return, and to discard the rest. It helps us see the forrest amidst the trees.

Filters create clarity out of complexity by providing barriers through which we can pass information, distilling the noise into our own version of signal. Think of them like prisms - refractory devices that alter the shape of light. They have the power to bend, split, and reflect light - ie information - creating novel ways of expressing the initial inputs. Give two prisms the same narrow band of light, and you will find wildly different results.

Filters operate in an analogous fashion. In the same way that prisms alter the shape of light, filters alter the shape of information. They condense, distill, and reframe - all according to the uniqueness of their design.

In his book The Creative Act, legendary music Rick Rubin provides a helpful triad to contextualize the art of filtering in relation to creativity:

“Source makes available. The Filter distills. The vessel receives.”

To Rubin, the world provides us with more source material - more information - than we can make sense of. As a result, we must learn to employ filters that reduce the information around us to what we deem most essential. By defining our filters up front, and cultivating them over time, we will be better able to find the signal we seek.

Filters are thus much more about reduction in quantity of information than reduction in quality. Think of them as boundaries rather than sieves - their role is to constrain the types of information you allow to capture your attention, rather than to make judgements about that information on the intake.

By reducing the magnitude of information allowed in, you in turn increase the purity. Less becomes more. Clarity emerges from complexity.

Final Thoughts - Insights from Practice

Some parting thoughts on parsing signal from noise and winning the fight for focus.

In a world where information is abundant and complexity abounds, our best hope lies in creating boundaries around our attention. By narrowing our peripherals in a manner aligned with our visions for the world, hope emerges - hope that we may reclaim control over a lost art: our ability to focus.

Filters are the mechanism through which to do so. They help narrow the infinite set of options to those aligned with our visions. And in doing so, they help us nourish voices that are distinctly ours. Rather than playing by the rules of others, we can begin to play by our own. Bringing more of our true selves to the world in the process.

As always, the best way to get better at the game is to play it. So as you practice the art of filtering over time, what once required effort will soon require little at all. The more you utilize your filters, the more finely tuned they will become.

But recognize that filters are not meant to be static. Rather, they should evolve over time, shifting alongside the sands of your interests. As your experiences expose you to the possibilities of the world, allow your filters to adapt accordingly.

Think of them like a flashlight - keep the beam of focus narrow, so that you may better avoid distraction. But do not be afraid to change the direction in which it points, illuminating new parts of the world so that you may better see amidst the dark.

And so, I’ll leave you with this: the path to focus is in your hands, if you wish to take hold of it. The battle of attention is won by constructing boundaries around your attention. In world of increasing noise, they are the path to drawing clarity from complexity.

Start by turning your focus inwards. Find the questions that pull at your soul, and allow them to direct your attention like a compass finding true north. Let everything else pass by.

Play by your own rules, win on your own terms.