When There Is Nothing More To Add: Simplifying Our Way Towards Perfection
“Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away” Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
I like the idea in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s quote about “perfection” and how it happens. This is the line everyone quotes and shares. He’s famous for two things in my mind: flying and for writing “The Little Prince”. Perfection — what a word. It is an ideal that means different things to each of us. And everyone is chasing it, whether they realize it or not.
It is like the laser light toy people use to play with their pet cats. Cats chase the light but the point of the laser pointer was to have fun and to play. Perfection is our laser pointer light and hopefully we never quite catch it.
And speaking of never catching laser lights, I am reminded about the problem of traveling at the speed of light. I refer to pop culture sci-fi ideas of spaceships flying between the stars as easily as hopping aboard a plane and leaving New York for Tokyo. This is for the moment unlikely. From what I read our best tech can get us moving faster and faster but it gets harder with each increment. You have to use increasing amounts of effort to go just a bit further as you approach the speed of light. Time slows down, your mass changes and you never quite hit the mark and go as fast as photons. You keep cutting away at the gap between less than light-speed and advance at an aching pace.
Achieving perfection, however you have defined it, by reduction, is a bit like this. The first cuts, edits and changes result in massive changes. You get enormous rates of changes off the low base of your starting point. But at some point you hit a limit. I know that at this time, I have reached just such a limit in terms of my trading techniques.
I was taught by my mentor about active investment trading as being simple but not easy. He had worked to strip away a lot of details and indicators used by others but had shared a methodology and a perspective about finding what works without the frills. And the day after he finished teaching me he was done, but I was still cutting, editing, optimizing and edging my way towards trading “perfection”. I’m not quite there and I doubt day will ever arrive but I do know I’m a lot further from my starting point than where I might be done.
It’s not just in trading and investment. We look for time savers, life hacks, or for “techniques”, to use in our day to day lives. Over the long haul we make choices about how to survive and who we have in our lives. Most start out with a sliver of one corner of the world to start life in. The fortunate have the entire world at their feet. But the truly blessed can imagine, see and expand their options- they have the most to work with. In the end everyone has only so many hours, only so much time on Earth, and only so much room for the world in their lives. We all must “take away” as we inch forward towards “perfection”.
Everything about this is reduction, simplification and optimization. What’s left over is used to help us live each and every day.
I include the following thoughts below which prompted this post.
I’m certain that I will be adding and updating this post but definitely taking away things too to make it more “perfect”.
notes to self: distraction is a choice, we can benefit from curation, simplification, editing and deletion
— edwardrooster (@edwardrooster) January 8, 2018
notes to self: Bruce Lee was trained by a master and edited forms to develop Jeet Kune Do
— edwardrooster (@edwardrooster) January 8, 2018
notes to self: The idea of filter failure is a pretty nifty articulation of managing the abundance of data and providers ht howard lindzon
— edwardrooster (@edwardrooster) January 8, 2018
notes to self: 20 years ago, in 1997, upon his return to Apple, Steve Jobs clarified his product vision with products put in 4 quadrants
— edwardrooster (@edwardrooster) January 8, 2018
notes to self: back in the day, and still today, the most appealing tech UX were reductions (and not just because of bandwidth constraints) that were direct to the point
— edwardrooster (@edwardrooster) January 8, 2018
Originally published at www.rooster360.com on January 11, 2018.
