When we talk about distilling something down, we’re talking about reducing it to its essence. We take something made up of many constituent parts and work to extract what matters most. The aim is not to capture everything, but to remove what is extraneous or confounding so that what remains is useful and clarifying.
This is a valuable framework because we live in a world defined by complexity. Nearly any current event could justify an entire book explaining how it came to be. Try to make sweeping statements about how things are or how they should be, and we immediately run into exceptions and counterexamples. Try to include every caveat, and the result becomes so long and convoluted that it loses its usefulness altogether.
Thinking through the lens of distillation helps us orient ourselves amid that overload. Like any framework, it has limits. Distillation is not particularly good at preserving nuance. What it excels at is helping us navigate chaos—situations where there is simply too much information, too many details, and too many competing signals to hold all at once. In this context, we need a guide, a heuristic to help us navigate through the noise towards what matters most.
By definition, distillation begins with excess. We start with more information than we need and gradually remove what is less essential. This cannot be shortcutted. If we start with limited information, and try to simplify, we’re not really developing useful learning or focusing on what’s important, we’re just dumbing down. Earned simplicity requires learning broadly and deeply, and only then digesting what we’ve learned down into what is most critical.
In a culture that rewards speed and confidence, it’s tempting to skip that process. We arrive at conclusions early and label them distilled wisdom. But extracting a “key takeaway” from shallow contact with a subject isn’t distillation—it’s premature certainty. That kind of certainty is rewarded with clicks, likes, and views, but it rarely endures. It mistakes confidence for understanding and collapses complexity before we’ve had meaningful contact with the contradictions, exceptions, and edge cases that actually matter.
I worry about this in the context of watching short-form video rather than movies, or reading tweets rather than books. The former might be able to capture similar emotions or present pithy understandings, but they are someone else’s simplicity. There is a famous zen koan, “If you see the buddha, kill the buddha.” It's a strange phrase, and essentially a warning against trusting received wisdom at the expense of what we ourselves must learn and discover to be true.
True distillation can’t be rushed, and it can’t happen at the beginning. When we start with a conclusion and work backward, we’ve missed the point entirely. Distillation is what comes after immersion—after learning widely, sitting with messiness, and allowing our understanding to mature. It is not the absence of knowledge, but what remains after understanding has done its work. The simplicity it produces is quieter and harder-won, but far more trustworthy and durable. Earned simplicity is the residue of engagement; lazy certainty is its opposite.
The irony of real distillation is that the better we are at it, the less impressive it appears. The ability to explain complex ideas clearly is a function of deep familiarity with complexity. When we have tremendous clarity about something, it feels so obvious that there is little to comment on. Yet that simplicity is the result of 10,000 repetitions, of tremendous amounts of effort and practice and work.
This framework of distillation, or earned simplicity, matters most when we turn it inward—toward how we live and what we value. It is not about sounding wise or arriving at certainty quickly. Sitting with the contradictions in our desires, emotions, and commitments is uncomfortable and often painful, which is precisely why we’re tempted to borrow clarity from others. But unearned conclusions fail us when life becomes chaotic, because they were never shaped by our own experience. When we skip that work, we inherit simplicity that cannot support us. What steadies us is not what sounds true, but what has been digested and distilled through sustained engagement with the messiness of our lives.
Love,
Doc
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