What shapes a life isn’t what you decide to do.
It’s what you’re willing to not do.

We live in an environment where everything is accessible and almost nothing is essential.
If you’re a serious reader and you make it past seventy, maybe you’ll finish fifteen thousand books.
The Library of Congress holds thirty-eight million. That’s 0.04% of what exists.

So the real skill isn’t reading.
It’s skipping.
Skipping the noise, the irrelevant, the things that don’t justify the hours you’ll never get back.
Filtering becomes a survival technique.

In construction, this idea becomes brutally concrete.
Our professional prime is roughly thirty years.
A full project—from first sketch to handover—takes about three.
Which means, in a lifetime, you might truly complete ten.

Ten projects to define your taste, your judgment, your standard, and whatever trace you leave behind.
The number is small enough to force clarity, but large enough to matter.

So, in order to be good—actually good—you can’t afford to scatter your attention.
You choose what to pursue by first choosing what to ignore.
You focus on the few things that justify the time, risk, and obsession required to do them well.

Everything else, you skip.