When There Is Nothing Left To Take Away

An Intimate Perfection Comes When There Is Nothing Left To Take Away

“Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s name conjures two things for me: flying and writing “The Little Prince”. Perfection — what a word. It is an ideal that means different things to each of us. And everyone is chasing it.

It is a laser light toy people use to play with their pet cats. Cats chase the light but the point of the laser pointer was to have fun and to play. We do the same but hopefully we never quite catch it. May we never catch what we think is perfection.

And speaking of never catching laser lights, I am reminded about the dream of traveling at the speed of light. I refer to pop culture sci-fi spaceships flying between the stars as easily as hopping on a plane and leaving New York for Tokyo, and back.

The Speed Of Light.

We can move faster and faster but it gets harder with each increment.

You have to use increasing amounts of effort to go just a bit further as you approach the speed of light. Time slows down, your mass changes and you never quite hit the mark and go as fast as photons. You keep cutting away at the gap between less than light-speed and advance at an aching pace. The gap never goes away.

Achieving perfection is like a starship stretching ever closer towards lightspeed.

The first cuts, edits and changes result in massive changes. You get enormous rates of changes off the low base of a starting point. But at some point you hit a limit.

I was taught by a mentor about trading as being simple but not easy. He worked to strip away a lot of details and indicators used by others but shared a methodology and a perspective about using what works without the frills. My progress exploded in those early days, thanks to cutting out what didn’t work in favor of what did.

The day he finished teaching me he was done, but I am still cutting, editing, optimizing and edging my way. I’m not quite there and I doubt that “day” will ever arrive but I do know I’m a lot further from my starting point.

It’s not just in trading and investment, it’s in my writing journey too. I found mentors, role models, and mimetic models of thick desire. The one principle everything I learned had in common was that “short cuts” were an outcome, not the objective.

Perfection does not come from time savers, life hacks, or techniques to scale. We save nothing worth saving from a crutch. This is not where any kind of perfection is found.

We look to do more with less time, when we should be doing less with more time.

I don’t mean less life or love, I mean more time lavished on fewer things. We choose.

We have to make choices or they’re made for us.

For however long our life is, we decide how to survive, what makes us thrive, and who we have in our lives. Some begin in a sliver of one corner of the world, some have the entire world at their feet. In the end, everyone has only so much time on Earth, and only so much room for the world in their lives.

The truly blessed among us can imagine, see, and expand their options of what they can cut. Bruce Lee, Picasso and Steve Jobs, and everyone with a base of classical training in something become masters of it because they cut their way forward.

Jewels need master tailors of stone. Sea glass needs time. Lenses need grinders.

What remains is personal perfection, which is a way of being, not an outcome.

We keep cutting away, and crawl towards and never quite touch “perfection”.

I’m certain that I will update this post, taking away but never reaching “perfect”.

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Notes:

*(I wrote this a few years ago, and cut away what worked then, for what works now.)

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