becoming yourself is a process of reduction

saying no as the ultimate unlock

Abstract 55662, 2021 by Kim Keever

It’s always funny to me when something that I have spent years trying to distill is captured perfectly by a simple cliché that I probably heard for the first time when I was ten years old. That’s the thing about clichés: as numb as we are to them, we always find our way back to their truths after learning their lessons the hard way.

The cliché I’m referring to in this case is the idea that “less is more.” We all know it to be true on some level, and maybe we’ve even pretended to be a minimalist for five minutes as we do our spring cleaning, but how many of us viscerally understand this truth? It feels like I have only started to understand the gravity of these simple words in the last few weeks. What got me here was realizing that in the process of becoming more of myself—a process that has accelerated in the last year especially—I have mostly cut things out of my life, rather than adding more things to it. I was reducing—distilling!—the self. I didn’t realize this as it was happening, of course. I was just doing my thing. But as I look back, I realize that I only started to understand myself when I cut out the majority of what I was giving energy to—things that on some level, I knew were not aligned with me.

the power of doing less

In doing less, I became more powerful. My energy was concentrated into a few buckets instead of being diverged across many. As a result, I was seeing my power more tangibly. I could see myself expressed in what I was focused on, because there was enough of me in it for it to feel like an expression of who I was.

An easy example of where this power concentrated was in my writing. For probably ~5 years before I started this substack, I had written on and off online. I would dip in and out of it, depending on my bandwidth at the time—depending on how much I had “going on.” It was only when I had spare power that I would spend it on my writing. So, despite it always being a part of my life, it never blossomed because I was always doing too much outside of it to ever truly focus on it. However, when I decided to put nearly all of my focus into writing, I literally felt myself expand into the practice. My writing got better, my vision became clearer, my energy came more alive, and I gained a much stronger sense of self—a sureness of who I was and what I was about. But the decision that preceded that energy shift was one of reduction: one of doing less.

focus as a force multiplier

When you do less, the things you do become better, because they contain a more potent concentration of you. When we put our full focus on something, we express ourselves through it without constraint, without thinking: should I really be doing x when I also have to do y, z, and q? When we try to budget our power across too many domains, we feel the constant weight of never doing well enough at any of them—of never really feeling like we are in our full power. Because when we are spread too thin, the weight of what we aren’t doing pokes incessantly at our consciousness, keeping our power from ever fully crystallizing. I recently read a quote that captures the power of focus well:

“I think of focused consciousness as a sharply focused, willfully directed, intense beam of light that illuminates only what it is focused on, leaving everything outside of its radius in the dark or in the shadows. It has a spotlight quality. In its most concentrated form, focused consciousness can even be like a laser beam, so piercing or dissecting in its ability to analyze that it can be incredibly precise or destructive—depending on the intensity and on what it is focused.” — Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman

true power is found in self-acceptance

Most of you more or less know me as the person that writes this substack. But before I was the person that wrote this substack, I was many things—too many things, probably. I was someone who identified with this ability—or need, rather—to be busy. It was like a point of pride for me, that I could do so many things at once and do them well. But I now look back with a cheeky laugh that I derived pride from diverging my power instead of concentrating it. Because in hindsight, I see someone who was scared to be who they genuinely were and coped with that fear by doing more, instead of doubling down on what was truly them.

sculpting an identity is about carving away the excess

I was always interested in being creative, but I couldn’t bear the thought of pursuing that interest with any real seriousness, so I supplemented my sense of self by doing something technical, something impressive, something “hard”—engineering. I couldn’t imagine introducing myself as a writer, so I did it on the side as I worked with money—a “real profession.” A real profession to who? Who knows. To those whose opinions I valued at the time, I suppose. I didn’t want to be who I truly was because I didn’t want to “just be a writer”, or “just be an artist”, or just be anything. I wanted to be everything, so I did everything. And in the process, I fractured my power. I fragmented my attention across too many domains to feel like I was doing anything of significance in any of them. But my sense of self was safe. No one could tell me that I wasn’t doing enough, or that I wasn’t good enough—because look at all these things I did! Clearly, if I could do all these things, I must be powerful!

But this isn’t true power. I see that now. I see power as focus. As choice. As reduction. Power comes from distillation, from seeing what you’re good at and doubling down on that. Power is admitting who you truly are and letting yourself embody that. Power is realizing that doing things to seem powerful does not make you powerful—it makes you weak. It’s realizing that all the powerful people we revere ignored the social status they could have grasped at by doing what would impress others, and instead chose to do what was truly them. This isn’t to say that you cannot do multiple things and be powerful, it’s only to say that the things you choose to do need to genuinely activate you—they need to be true to you.

focus does not need to be one-dimensional

Being multifaceted is often a plus. Some of the best mathematicians were lawyers who did math problems in their free time. Who is to say that law was just a shadow career for them bred out of fear? We cannot really know if that is true or not. We can only see that they were still powerful enough to be remembered today, that they meaningfully advanced the world of mathematics while operating in an entirely different profession. Perhaps the nature of switching between worlds was enriching for them. Clearly, they were activated enough to do something they enjoyed with such vigour that they broke new ground in it.

I bring up this example because I don’t want this idea that “becoming yourself is a process of eliminating what is not true” to be interpreted as “cut out everything and choose one thing.” That is certainly one path—but dramatic changes like that are not always the first—or last!—step in the process of becoming yourself. Self-trust is embodied in the most minute sense. Like: order the thing you actually want in the restaurant. Do the type of exercise you actually like. Keep the habits that serve you, discard the ones you think you “should” do but don’t actually resonate with. Spend time alone. Look into your inner world. So much of what is true to us can only be found by going inwards. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises his young friend who is trying to find his truth:

“Finally, I should like to give you just one other piece of advice: to follow quietly and earnestly the course of your development. You cannot disturb it more drastically than if you direct your thoughts outwards and expect from without the answer to questions which probably only your innermost feeling in the quietest hour of your life can answer.”

Rilke is saying: when you go outwards to find answers that can only be found in your inner world, you distort your sense of self. You complicate the process of becoming. You add unnecessary things to your life. Looking externally for the answers that are nested internally is how we end up with too much, confused about who we are, stewing in excess. We can only find what is true for us by cultivating self-trust, by leaning into our gifts, and listening with genuine interest and seriousness to the inclinations that rise up within us. We become ourselves by limiting what we do—by reducing and reducing until we are left only with what activates us.

Rilke says in another letter to his young, confused, meaning-seeking friend (which for all intensive purpose could be anyone going through even the smallest trace of existential angst):

“You are so young, all beginnings so far in front of you, and I should like to beg you earnestly to have patience with all unsolved problems in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not search for the answers, which cannot be given to you, because you could not live them. That is the point, to live everything. Now you must love your problems. And perhaps gradually, without noticing it, you will live your way into the answer some distant day.”

Rilke’s emphasis continues to be on going inwards for the answers, on living out the questions, on learning experientially, on keeping only what is true. Paradoxically, society tells us that it is through having more, getting more, consuming more, rhat we will be happier, become more ourselves. When we are young, we learn that to be in full expression, we need to do everything at once—the academics, the involvement, the extracurricular activities, the sports—all of it. That living powerfully means doing everything we can. But the path to the self is not a continuous process of adding. This is how we become distant from ourselves. I’m learning in my own time that true power comes from choice, from reduction—from focus. That to become more, we need to do less.

saying no is a thankless act

No one congratulates you on the things you say no to. The opposite, actually. Usually, people will encourage, pressure, and praise you for saying yes, and punish you for saying no. Doing more is what gets attention and validation in the short-term. But indulging in short-term busyness in order to impress others is just another distraction from what is true, from the things we must focus on. Saying no in order to protect your energy is an act of defiance—an act of rebellion. There’s that timeless Emerson line I always come back to: to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

In the beginning, staying focused can feel like you’re surrendering your power. Saying no feels like you’re opting in to missing out. Like you are limiting your potential somehow. But saying no is the key ingredient to success. In Steve Jobs’ famous words:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.”

This quote is it. This is what it looks like to build anything of real significance—whether it is building up yourself, a product, a company, or an idea. It’s about knowing what it truly is—crisply, clearly—which in turn, tells you everything it is not. And then honouring what it is by rejecting all that it is not. Saying no is not intuitive. Saying yes feels like the thing that will expand us. Add more. Do more. That feels like the path to becoming. But to actually see our power fully expressed, we need to say no.

protecting what is true is easier said than done

Embodying this knowledge is an entirely different thing from knowing it (as is the case with all practical knowledge). We can intellectually understand that we need to focus, that we need to lean into what feels right. But living it is a different lifestyle entirely. To ruthlessly be willing to say no is not behaviour many of us have ever seen modelled. Because almost no one does this—both because it is incredibly hard to do and because it is predicated on knowing yourself well enough to know that the vast majority of what comes your way is not aligned with you. Most people just say yes to what comes at them, which is why most people end up living very similar lives to each other. The world is not conducive to focus—it is conducive to creating entropy, and swallowing your priorities amidst the chaos it generates.

know your power to harness it effectively

If you are a powerful source of energy, learning this lesson becomes even more important. People will always want a piece of your attention. Getting clear on your priorities is about learning to say no, and standing in the power of what you know feels right to you. The process of becoming is a process of trimming the excess in your life, redefining your priorities until you know exactly what you do, and what you do not do. Saying no will never be something people encourage or welcome, but the process of self-actualization is one inherently done upstream—continuously overcoming external resistance is simply the cost of attempting it.

The world around you is not designed to empower or enable self-expression. So, if becoming your true self is something you aspire to, you need to take full responsibility for actualizing that desire. And that requires a lot of no’s, a lot of reduction, and a lot of focus. None of which are particularly easy to uphold in a world of distraction. But as Rilke says so wisely in one of his last letters: We know little, but that we must attach ourselves to what is difficult is a certainty that never deserts us. It is good to be lonely, for loneliness is difficult. The fact that a thing is difficult must be for us the more reason for doing it. Becoming yourself is hard, because trusting yourself is hard, and saying no to what does not feel right is hard. And it is because becoming yourself is hard, that we have all the more reason to do it.

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If you enjoyed this, you might like my related pieces: growing pains and self-trust. You can also find my daily stream of consciousness on Twitter.