3 posts tagged with "Philosophy"

In Rick Rubin's The Creative Act, there's an idea that caught my attention and stuck with me.

When musicians record a demo, they often fall in love with it. The specific sounds, the particular arrangement, all the little details that made it feel alive in that moment. But those details can become a cage. You can't expand a completed version when there's no room to grow.

So what do some of the best do? They write the demo out as sheet music. Strip it to the skeleton: just the melody, the chords, the structure. Destroy everything that isn't essential. Then hand it to the band and rebuild from the bones.

The result isn't a polished version of the original. It's something new, something with room to breathe.

Distill Before You Expand​

This connects to something Charlie Munger talks about: inversion. Instead of asking "how do I make this better?" you ask "what would make this worse?" and then avoid those things. Don't try to be brilliant. Just don't be stupid.

The instinct for most builders is to add. When something isn't working, the question is usually "what can I add to fix it?" But sometimes the better question is "what can I remove?"

Not every problem needs a new feature. Sometimes the answer is fewer moving parts, not more.

Destruction Is a Variant of Done​

There's a short document called the Cult of Done Manifesto, written by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark in 2009. It has thirteen principles about finishing things, and principle eleven says simply: "Destruction is a variant of done."

That reframes everything. Throwing something away isn't failure. It's completion. Tearing something down to its core and starting fresh isn't going backward, it's a form of finishing. You're done with the version that no longer serves you.

The manifesto also says "done is the engine of more." Completion isn't the end, it's what creates space for the next thing. And sometimes the fastest way to complete something is to destroy the parts that are weighing it down.

The Eye for Importance​

The real skill isn't building. Anyone can add. The skill is knowing what's load-bearing and what's just there.

Systems want to expand. Features accumulate. Complexity creeps in because each addition made sense at the time. But eventually you're maintaining things that don't matter anymore, and the weight of all that maintenance slows everything down.

This is especially relevant now that AI can generate and expand almost anything on demand. The bottleneck isn't creation anymore. It's curation. Knowing what to keep and what to cut. Having an eye for the essential.

Expansion is easy. Distillation is hard.

Rebuild From the Bones​

The Rubin insight isn't about destruction for its own sake. It's about creating room. You strip something to its skeleton not to abandon it, but to rebuild it better. The melody is still there. The core is still there. But now there's space to grow in directions the original version couldn't accommodate.

If you're a builder, someone who loves adding layers and refining systems, this might feel counterintuitive. The instinct to add is strong because it feels like progress. But sometimes the most productive thing you can do is subtract. Strip something back to its bones, see what's actually essential, and only then decide what deserves to be rebuilt.

What have you built that might need breaking down?

My wife is Korean, and she has this way of teasing me that always lands harder than she thinks. She calls me 잔망 (janmang), which is a Korean word for someone who's mischievous, playfully silly, always clowning around. And honestly, she's not wrong. I've always been reactive, excitable, quick to jump into whatever energy is in the room. I get distracted easily, I talk too much, and I've always worn my emotions on the outside.

Then she'll say it: "You should be more like a tree."

In Korean culture, there's an adage about the ideal man. A man like a tree is someone who doesn't sway with every wind. He grows slowly, steadily, rooted in place, strong enough to shelter the people around him. He's not cold or rigid, just unmoved by the things that don't matter so he can show up fully for the things that do.

I used to brush this off. That's not me, I'm the fun one. Trees are boring. But then I became a father, and I started to understand what she meant.

When Stillness Becomes Necessary​

There's a moment that I think every new parent has, where you realize the chaos isn't going to stop. The sleep deprivation, the crying, the constant low-grade anxiety of keeping a tiny human alive. You can't outrun it and you can't out-energy it. You can only learn to be still inside of it.

I've meditated on and off for years, but I never really took it seriously. It was something I did when I remembered, more of a box to check than a real practice. Becoming a father changed that. Not overnight, but slowly, in the hard moments. Flynn is crying, I'm exhausted, I can feel the frustration rising up in my chest and I want to react to it, I want to snap or shut down or reach for my phone. But I'm learning to do something different. I'm learning to feel that negative emotion come up and not associate with it. To step back from it, watch it, and let it pass without it becoming who I am in that moment.

I'm still not good at it. I'm taking meditation seriously for maybe the first time in my life, and I can feel the difference it's making, but it is still very difficult. Some days I sit there and my mind won't stop. Some days Flynn cries and I lose my patience anyway. But there's something growing in those moments of practice, even the failed ones. A centre, a quiet place that, when I can find it, doesn't move when everything else does.

Growing the Tree​

That centre is your consciousness and your will. It's the part of you that knows what's right before you react, the decision-maker that, when it acts, you feel it in your chest. Not anxiety or excitement, something quieter. Alignment.

You have to grow it deliberately, the way you'd water a real tree. Daily, without drama, trusting that the roots are going deeper even when you can't see the progress.

Meditation grows it, but so does any practice where you choose stillness over reaction. Pausing before you respond when someone pushes your buttons, sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to fix it, holding your position when the market or life is screaming at you to move. Every time you choose the harder silence over the easier reaction, the trunk gets a little thicker.

I've been building this tree-like nature into my life as a core principle. It's become one of the things I care most about developing, not just as a practice but as a way of being.

Being Strong Doesn't Mean Being Stiff​

This is where I think people get it wrong. Being like a tree doesn't mean you stop laughing or being excitable or being yourself. Trees bend in storms. They lose their leaves in winter. They're alive, constantly growing, constantly adapting.

The difference is where the movement comes from. A reactive person moves because the world moves them. Something happens and they get pulled along like a leaf in the current. A centred person moves because they choose to. The storm hits, the branches sway, but the trunk holds and the roots go deeper.

I still laugh too loud. I still get excited about things. Inwu still teases me for it. But there's something underneath now that wasn't there before, a weight, a centre of gravity that lets me be playful on the surface because I know I'm solid underneath.

The Man My Son Will See​

My son Flynn is almost ten months old. He doesn't know what a tree is yet, and he doesn't know about Korean adages or meditation or personal philosophy. But he watches me, and he watches everything.

What I want him to see, not when he's old enough to understand words but right now when he's old enough to feel energy, is a father who is present. Not reactive or scattered or reaching for distractions when things get hard, but rooted. Steady. Growing.

Inwu was right all along. I'm just finally learning how to listen.

Here's the first principle that changed how I think about money: money shouldn't be the goal. Money is meant to be used, or burned, to be effective. Think of it as gasoline or fuel. It must be used to create value, to transfer, or to make something out of it.

Traditionally, money was seen merely as a medium for exchange, but in today's world, it's much more than that. You don't just let it sit there. You can invest it, save it, change it, and make it work for you. When it's working for you, in essence, it's being burned to earn more. The idea isn't to hoard money but to create a feedback loop that gains you more.