Reflections 30th March

on the barnacles that slow us down.

Photo by George Liapis on Unsplash

On Barnacles

A small moment of insight last week has stayed with me. I was in the usual routine of buying yet another book, and then paused and asked myself:

“Why are you buying this? Do you really need it, or are you avoiding figuring it out yourself?”

Books are a form of technology, and in some ways, they’re an early version of the Internet. It’s easy to think that the answers we need are already written down somewhere, that someone else has worked it all out and that their version is safer than our own attempt.

But the truth is, books—like most technology—can turn into clutter. They stick to us like barnacles on a ship.

Instead of helping us move through work smoothly, we can find they start to slow us down. Our thinking gets sluggish; we read more books searching for answers instead of doing the work ourselves. Using ever more energy trying to push forward, weighed down by everything we’ve added.

As a ship’s hull attracts barnacles, so all processes att…