The most essential skill we’ve never been taught is learning what to ignore.
The person who can focus their attention on what matters goes further than the person who can’t.
When we don’t know what to ignore, everything assumes equal importance. Time is wasted on things that don’t move us forward.
You can focus your time on the non-essential or the essential, but not both. All the time you spend on the non-essentials comes at the expense of the essentials.
Knowing what to ignore allows you to focus your time on what matters. Of course, this is harder than it seems.
Let me tell you a story about Albert Einstein.
A lot of people think Einstein’s greatest ability was his mathematical mind. It wasn’t. Granted it’s probably better than yours or mine, but most people in the know consider his mathematical gifts average at best.
How does someone with average mathematical gifts rise to the top?
He had another skill. A skill most people don’t even think about.
Einstein’s greatest skill was keeping things simple by knowing what mattered and what didn’t. When everyone else was lost in complexity, he could keep things simple. He knew what to ignore.
In his short biographical memoir on Einstein, John Wheeler points out that Einstein didn’t understand more complicated things than others; he appreciated the value of simplicity more than others.
Many a man in the street thinks of Einstein as a man who could only make headway in his work by dint of pages of complicated mathematics; the truth is the direct opposite. As Hilbert put it, “Every boy in the streets of our mathematical Gottingen understands more about four-dimensional geometry than Einstein. Yet, despite that, Einstein did the work and not the mathematicians.” Time and again, in the photoelectric effect, in relativity, in gravitation, the amateur grasped the simple point that had eluded the expert.
While it’s tempting to think that Einstein was born with this skill, that would be a lie. He intentionally developed it as an adult.
“I soon learned,” Einstein wrote, “to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind.”
Where did Einstein acquire this ability to sift the essential from the non-essential?
In the view of many, the position of clerk of the Swiss patent office was no proper job at all, but it was the best job available to anyone with (Einstein’s) unpromising university record. He served in the Bern office for seven years, from June 23, 1902 to July 6, 1909. Every morning he faced his quote of patent applications. Those were the days when a patent application had to be accompanied by a working model. Over and above the applications and the models was the boss, a kind man, a strict man, a wise man. He gave strict instructions: explain very briefly, if possible in a single sentence, why the device will work or why it won’t; why the application should be granted or why it should be denied.
Day after day Einstein had to distill the central lesson out of objects of the greatest variety that man has power to invent. Who knows a more marvelous way to acquire a sense of what physics is and how it works? It is no wonder that Einstein always delighted in the machinery of the physical world—from the action of a compass needle to the meandering of a river, and from the perversities of a gyroscope to the drive of Flettner’s rotor ship.
Who else but a patent clerk could have discovered the theory of relativity? “Who else,” Wheeler writes, “could have distilled this simple central point from all the clutter of electromagnetism than someone whose job it was over and over to extract simplicity out of complexity.”
Most of us don’t know what to ignore. Because of that, we try to consume more information, thinking it will help us. If you find yourself searching for more information and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for, it’s a strong indication you don’t understand the problem. If you understood the problem, you’d know what information to hone in on.
When all information is valued equally, irrelevant information is over-valued, and relevant information is under-valued.
The best in the world have an uncanny ability to focus on the few variables that matter and ignore the rest.
What can I take away from this article?
Most information is irrelevant. Most of our time spent chasing it is wasted. Knowing what to ignore saves us from wasting time, and it helps us spend more time on the things that matter. The more time we spend on what matters, the better the results we get.
Developing the skills of sifting the essential from the non-essential is within our grasp. Try these five things:
- Focus on understanding basic, timeless, general principles of the world and use them to help filter people, ideas, and projects;
- Take time to think about what we’re doing by writing it out;
- Keep it simple. There is a natural entropy to life that nudges us towards complexity. Remove everything inessential;
- Think backwards about what we want to avoid;
- Think long and hard about the voices and information you let into your mind. Think about who you follow on social media. Think about the books you read. The newsletter you subscribe to.