
…productive for him. At the top of the list: you should first approach your problem by simplifying. “Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another,” Shannon said, “and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do.”
None of us need to be told that the pursuit of money can obscure what’s important and valuable. But it is useful to remind ourselves that wealth nearly always comes as an indirect effect of incredible work rather than as the end goal. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham puts it like this, “I get a lot of criticism for tellin…
f money is a powerful distra…re riches.” As odd as it sounds that riches are something to be “endured,” Seneca has a point here: the pursuit of money is a powerful distraction from the pursuit of what truly matters. Money is neither the root of all evil nor the solution to all of our problems: the question is whether it gets in the way of what’s morally important.