Yesterday morning, as Lauren cycled off to the local spa for some well-earnt R&R, I swept Baby Grundy into Fort Grundy’s master bedroom, fired up a podcast and got to work on the laundry.

Steven Bartlett was interviewing the modern day Indian sage Sadhguru.

At one point, Sadhguru asked Steven if he’d prefer his intellect to be blunt or sharp.

Unsurprisingly, Steven plumped for sharp.

Sadhguru went on:

“If I give you a sharp instrument like a knife, you must be very conscious how you move your hand. This is why we don't give a knife to a child. Their hand is not steady enough.

It’s not because the knife is dangerous though. Never in history has a knife jumped up and stabbed somebody. It’s the hand that’s dangerous. The hand can chop vegetables. It can also do surgery and save somebody's life or hurt somebody and take their life.

All these things, the hand does. Not the knife.

Your intellect is a sharp instrument too. And once you have a sharp instrument you must know how to hold it.

The only problem is, nobody does. 

Everybody is hurting themselves and they think something is wrong with life. You could call this stress, anxiety, misery…whatever you want to call it. But essentially we have the sharp instrument of our intellects and without knowing it, we’re hurting ourselves”

This last bit stopped me in the middle of folding a woolly pink sock.

I NEVER would’ve joined the dots between my oh-so-precious intellect and my stress.

Never.

If anything, my intellect was my jewel in the crown. It was by my side as I aced my exams at school and took down poker tournaments in Las Vegas. And when it came to my stress, my intellect was the obvious tool to figure out how to be less stressed.

In fact, it was the only tool I thought could fix my stress.

But actually, in the last 3 or 4 years I've come round to Sadhguru's idea more and more. I think I have been using my intellect in various unhelpful and stress-provoking ways.

For instance:

My intellect was always very good at grabbing random "what ifs" about a normal Tuesday morning meeting, analysing everything that could go wrong in that meeting and then building a watertight case for why I should be stressed.

So my intellect wasn’t observing my stress. It was manufacturing it.

This got me thinking:

What if the way to sharpen our intellects and hold them more safely is to take our thoughts less seriously, not more seriously?

Maybe that sounds absurd. Especially to anyone reading this who's studied hard, acquired a bunch of know-how and had lots of success as a result. But I’m not talking about knowledge so much as I am about thoughts. Thoughts like opinions, rules, judgements, beliefs, mental commentary, second-guessing and “what-ifs”.

It’s really no different to sharpening a knife.

No-one ever sharpened a knife by adding more metal. You sharpen a knife by subtracting metal instead.

All of which brings me to the nub:

A few months ago, I ran a Subtraction Method workshop for NYT bestselling author Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s community. A few months before that, I ran a similar workshop for daily email maestro John Bejakovic's readers. 

At the heart of the workshops was the idea that dropping our mental clutter is what helps us see through the illusion there’s something wrong with life.

If you have a team or community of people who might enjoy a fresh perspective on stress, overthinking and getting smarter via the art of subtraction, I’d love to run a workshop for you too.

Hit reply if so and we’ll take it from there.

To fulfilment,

Tom