In “A Study in Scarlet“, Sherlock Holmes reveals to an astonished Watson that he had no idea that the earth rotated around the sun.

When Watson wonders how such basic fact could be ignored by “any civilized human being in this nineteenth century”, much less by a detective famous for his intellect, Sherlock gives this explanation:

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

On the other hand, a smarter person pays close attention to what he puts in his “brain-attic”, because he knows that “it is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent”.

I was reminded of this story lately when watching the BBC’s excellent modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes. Just like in the book, a surprised Watson discovers that Sherlock doesn’t know the first thing about the solar system. And the fact that the series takes place in the 21st century and not the 19th only serves to underscores Sherlock’s ignorance.

However, I feel like there’s still merit to this idea of “not crowding up your brain-attic”. I recently read a great post by Adam Smith explaining how grit is the most important quality to succeed in any enterprise, above self-control and intelligence.

In that post, Adam discusses ways one can deliberately increase their “grittiness”:

Second, I wonder if it’s possible to trade away some self-control to get more grit.  That sounds like a good bargain.

Some studies show that willpower is a limited resource; if you use willpower for task A then you’ll have less left over for task B.  If this is true, maybe you should exert less self-control in some areas in order to have more willpower left over for commitment to your long term goals.

Doesn’t that sound a little like Sherlock’s philosophy? Letting go of certain things will make it easier to focus on what really matters.

I find that this principle applies to pretty much any area of life. If you’re not cleaning up your brain-attic regularly, it’ll quickly get filled up not only with pointless distractions, but especially with things that may seem like they matter, but ultimately don’t.

Stories about great men and women often emphasize how dedicated to their work they are, and how much they care about every little detail. But what gets left out of the story, is that to be able to care so much about one thing, you have to not care at all about thousands of other.

So here’s my advice: if you want to accomplish more, start caring less.