Make the Nonessential Bleed Red
Learn to be your own editor — and cut what's keeping you from your goals.
My journalism career began as a copy editor at a daily newspaper in metro Atlanta. If you were born around 2005 or later, then ask your parents about where newspapers came from, and how we used to carry around coins to buy them. Like savages.
Starting out as a copy editor was (and probably still is) the most brilliant starting point to becoming a communications professional or, for the sake of the exercise I recommended recently, an essentialist. In this job, you’re generally tasked with removing excess words, writing headlines that compel readers to buy a paper or consume an entire story, and in some cases where you’re also a page designer, understanding how to make the story fit in the space available.
By the time any news or editorial copy makes it onto a page, it’s likely been reviewed by at least two news editors as well as the reporter who wrote it up — assuming they’re better at editing their own work than Lois Lane (who, in every portrayal of the character, is notoriously awful at spelling … save her, Rachel Brosnahan!). But once it’s on a page in the copy editor’s hands, the story becomes subject to the red pen. Think of a sword drawing blood from a dragon … it can save and kill stories in a single use.
It’s a different experience from, say, getting your essays or book reports graded in high school. As was often the case back in my day (the late 20th century … again, ask your parents about it), the teacher is judging whether you can write well enough to communicate ideas and prove you can analyze those of others. In short, you were trained to write so you could reveal how to think for yourself.
When we’re hit with trauma or setbacks, we’re often not thinking at all. Our minds are clouded with feelings of anxiety, anger, shame, regret … a toxic mixture of emotions that prevents us from seeing the clear path forward to the better times ahead.
When we seek to make progress in life, our daily to-do lists can feel so overwhelming that our long-term goals get reduced to nothing more than dreams, particularly the “American” ones.
Finding Your Grand Plans Again
It’s easy to let the word “hopeless” pop into your brain. I’ve felt hopeless a number of times, even after I began my road to becoming The Soloist. But have you ever stopped to really examine what obstacles in your day-to-day choices make you feel hopeless? Or do you feel like a cog in a machine, keeping your fingers crossed that the rest of the cogs do their jobs so the machine doesn’t fall apart?
The navigation of life is done with a compass composed of habits, trade-offs, and luck. And let’s get something out of the way right now: You will never control luck. It’s the external force that will either aid you or impede you, and you don’t have a say as to which it will do for you at any time. And if you can’t accept that, then you should spend your time on anything but reading this Substack. Author, podcaster and NYU Professor Scott Galloway often says, “Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.” I mostly agree, though I would argue luck can be the one exception.
But you can better calibrate your habits and trade-offs by learning how to differentiate the essential from the nonessential. And again, like everything we talk about regarding The Soloist, it requires practice.
Train Yourself on What Matters
For an example exercise, let’s start with a baseline. To survive as a human being every day, you have four essential needs: food, clothing, shelter, and health care. Assuming you have a job or regular income, questions you might ask could include:
On food:
Is what I’m regularly eating optimal for healthy living?
Could a simpler, repeatable meal plan free time + money without harming joy?
How much of my weekly shop ends up uneaten or trashed — and why?
On clothing:
Do I have enough clothes to wear for the climate + work + play?
Have I kept anything in my closet that I haven’t used in the past 30 days, or the past year?
Is laundry/storage manageable or secretly stressing me out?
On shelter:
Does my home provide safety, rest, and warmth?
Are housing costs crowding out other essentials?
Does my environment support mental clarity or amplify noise and clutter?
On health care:
Do daily habits — sleep, movement, nutrition, stress rituals — reinforce or erode my baseline health?
Is my insurance (or cash reserve) robust enough to handle a surprise $1–5 k bill (I’ll rant on health care in America at a later date)?
Do I need a check on my mental health with a pro — or at least a trusted confidant?
As you consider your answers, you’ll likely feel varying degrees of stress between “All’s good” and “Why, God? Why?!?” And if you’re feeling more toward the latter, then you’ll start to understand that you have more choices than you may have realized beforehand. Where we put our time and energy is a trade-off that we decide to add or remove from other agendas, like learning a new language, getting in shape, or building a business.
But when you don’t satisfy any one of these four essential needs, you will suffer more and faster. Build a routine of checking in on the basics until these decisions become your new default habits. And when you see signs of time and energy wasted on nonessential choices that prevent you from making your dreams a reality, then pull out the red pen and go to work.
You can do anything in your life, but you can’t do everything. Practice being your own editor. Strike through the words that no longer belong in your story. Because when you use the red pen, you mean it.
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