distillation

The details we think matter likely don’t when we go deep enough : The “accordion” exercise we did felt like powerful psycho technology the way it completely changed how I thought about getting to the essence of experiences and ideas. In the exercise, you go from 3 minutes of a speech to 2 minutes to 1 minute to 30 seconds to 15 seconds, and then ba... See more

Ideas sometimes seem to need days or weeks or months to get to a point where they feel fully formed. If you try to force a solution to a problem into a preset window of time, you will almost certainly reach a suboptimal solution.

I’ll often have ideas sitting in my focus folder for weeks or months and keep tossing thoughts into them, and then one d... See more

Here's what I've come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation. Sim... See more