He starts with a few choice examples: Breathing is an example of a totally abstract principle. We do in subconsciously, never thinking about it, never multitasking. Piloting an airplane relies on abstraction, too, as a handful of dials and knobs represent all the complex tasks that a pilot doesn’t need a PhD in order to use. Have you ever looked inside one of those things? It’s like a labyrinth of buttons with every wrong move being life or death. Abstraction strips away complexities to leave the relevant: Take action A to accomplish task Z without thinking about steps B to Y in between. The fastest path between two points is a lot faster when you take a shortcut. The actual term comes from software engineering. As Wikipedia puts it, the process “works by establishing a level of complexity on which a person interacts with the system, suppressing the more complex details below the current level.” But Smoot teases out the greater meaning: This is particularly applicable advice to startup founders and other entrepreneurs: Cutting your burn rate and repeating what works are ever-growing necessities. How can you remove the unneeded complex items and tasks in your daily process? By making abstraction a priority, that’s how.
