Clearing Out The Mind Junk

Sherlock Holmes made an unusual claim in “A Study In Scarlet”: 

“A man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic. […] A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before.”

I used to think that — while that sounded impressive and deep — it was, in reality, simply untrue.

The human brain has huge amount of memory capacity. So why would you want to restrict what you put in there artificially?

But more recently, I’m coming to realise that there is a huge amount going for this approach. That you really do want to carefully curate what you put in your mind.

But it’s not about restricting the number of blank facts going in there. Instead, where this really matters is at the level of worldview and key concepts.

You need to simplify your thinking about what you want out of life. Reduce your understanding of what’s important down to a few core principles and insights.

Then you reap huge benefits.

Why so?

First, this gives you insight and judgement. You’ve got to really think about what’s valuable when you’re forced to cut things down.

When you have to throw things out this you get clear on what matters. Otherwise it’s easy to let things pile up “in case they’re useful someday” — cluttering up your mind and weighing down your future opinions and insights.

When you’re loaded up with all these ideas about what might be relevant then it clogs up your hard drive. You’ve got to sift through a huge pile of junk every time you make some decision or think about how you want to view the world.

When you’ve cleared out all the junk then you’re unburdened, swift and manoeuvrable.

You leap to conclusions and insights in an instant. You see through the forest to what’s up ahead because it’s not clogged up with trees everywhere blocking your view. You join the dots because only the most relevant ones are there (rather than a whole jumble of noise that makes spotting any pattern impossible).

But that junk that you need to clear out isn’t only restricting your thinking.

It causes you to take all sorts of bad actions too. Because when you’ve got the “piles of junk” in your mind that you’re constantly sifting through, you feel you’ve got to use it all.

Let’s say you see a new opportunity and you’re thinking about how to exploit it. Your plethora of options and angles means that you quickly acquire a huge long list of potential “small wins”.

This automatically turns into feeling that you should do them!

Now you find yourself feeling obliged to set up a long programme of works that all have to get done (because, though they’re not vital and many aren’t even that impactful — they do all produce positive results).

Now…

You could choose to activate your willpower at this point. Choose to be “mentally tough” and simply push past those feelings of guilt.

But that’s hard.

Much easier (and far more sensible) to set things up so you never feel that guilt in the first place.

If you’ve done the work once and for all beforehand at the level of overarching principles then you’ve already cut down the field. So you’re only even considering implementing a small selection of the possible options.

Options where tiny amounts of time and effort lead to outsize results. And where those results are fully aligned with your goals.

When you’re clear on what concepts and values belong in your mind in the first place… And you deliberately clear out the stuff that doesn’t fit that… Then you streamline both your thinking and your obligations later.

You’re freer and faster in thought. And you’re freer and faster in deed.