If you’re like me, you’re constantly trying to get better at something, and often many things. Constantly trying to improve. This desire manifests in seeking improvements across many facets of life. Relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners. Career. Physical fitness. Food habits and discipline. Sleep. Travel. Seeking new experiences. The list is often endless and often energizing. However, can also feel intimidating and cause significant angst.

A pattern that I’ve noticed emerge as a result of this desire is that one defaults to ‘solving’ it by doing more. Work more. Read more. Book another trip. Commit to another plan. Listen to content at 1.5x or even 2x speed. Sometimes, this approach is the right answer, especially over short periods of time. It can also be exhausting. More importantly, it can take away the pleasure of doing things and lead to being too far removed from the rationale for doing these things in the first place.

The point is to lead a better life, whatever that means to you. I suspect that doesn’t mean doing more just for the sake of it, rather, means doing what will truly move the needle on your objectives. Oftentimes, that requires reflection. It requires doing things because they have utility. It requires deliberation and thoughtfulness. That inherently takes time and focus. The only way to create space for that to happen is to prioritize. Prioritize – not by adding more to an already busy schedule and doing more, but first by reflecting on what truly has utility and subtracting out the rest.

We have unlimited access to learn about ‘optimizing’ everything on demand. The true differentiator is to be able to use this access to drive favorable behavior. This involves developing the muscle to take a step back, reflect, subtract the unnecessary, and be deliberate with how you choose to spend your finite time.

An approach that works for me is setting up routines for what I do want to do including setting aside specific time for deliberation. From a personal standpoint, it’s meditating and journaling. From a professional standpoint, it’s putting recurring times on the calendar to reflect on both tactical and strategic items. This is not to say I’ve perfected any of this. I anticipate that, by design, it will continue to be a work-in-progress. However, realizing that you have to stop doing a lot and prioritize what you care about was a powerful lesson. I suspect it’s one that I will continue to come back to.

P.S. As I was discussing the idea for this post, a friend noted the book, Subtract by Leidy Klotz that expounded on this. I can’t speak to the book specifically. However, as noted above, I vouch for the core idea (unless I’m misunderstanding the summary).

It can feel extremely satisfying to classify something into a bucket. In doing so, you can tap into any preexisting knowledge you may have in that category. You don’t have to start learning from scratch. In fact, identifying patterns and using heuristics are essential to making sense of the world. However, these shortcuts won’t always lead to an optimal outcome. The more nuanced and idiosyncratic a topic at hand, the less reliable any single heuristic will be in optimizing the outcome.

When I’m faced with an unfamiliar situation or am learning something new, this is a principle I try to be cognizant of. The obvious downside of this approach is that it’s time-consuming and the benefits are uncertain when you start. Additionally, it can be overwhelming to learn something without leveraging prior knowledge. In a lot of scenarios, the outcome might not even be meaningfully better. For instance, you can derive the constant, pi, independently, but the approximation of 3.14 is likely sufficiently informative.

When diving deep into an important topic, however, I selectively use this mindset of embracing amguiguity. That way, I find that I can decrease the likelihood of hitting a local maximum. A common example of this is using principles from one sport to inform your approach to a similar sport. When I first started playing squash, I used my knowledge of basic racquetball techniques to guide my approach. Initially, my game improved, but eventually, it hit a plateau until I learned techniques more specific to squash from observation and research (i.e. youtube). As a consequence, I had to change aspects of my gameplay in ways that felt unintuitive. After the initial hump though, I got better and now enjoy the sport more than ever. This doesn’t mean I’ve reached my maximum potential, but I did reach a level that wasn’t possible before.

All this to say, it can be hard to overcome our heuristics and to accept the ambiguity that comes with it. However, it can enable us to unlock insights that we couldn’t have accessed before and that’s rewarding. This is the reason to selectively (but wholeheartedly) embrace ambiguity.