Your original motivation for something can be forgotten as you focus on a solution that grows ever more complex – and you act as if the solution is what you fundamentally want, because you forgot how you ended up working so hard on it.

The refrain "don't lose the root for the tree" reminds you to think of what you originally wanted and ask if there are different paths towards achieving it.

I guess the idea overlaps with the sunk cost fallacy, but it uses an active phrase (easier to apply) and is more general, covering sunk costs you forgot about. Also may remind you to do a "breadth-first search" of the solution space.

The generic male, e.g. "los" in Spanish – not only a formality. Yes, "everyone knows" women are included, but studies show that people overwhelmingly think of males. I got the impression these are pretty good studies too.

Languages come in three groups –

1. those that weave gender into the language, like Spanish
2. those that don't, but allow optionally specifying gender, like English and Swedish
3. those where you can't say gender, like Finnish

Turns out that the most unequal societies belong to the first group, and the most equal belong to the second. The third may sound ideal, but they make it hard to correct for biases present in culture: in practice, because of the cultural default male, it's not like having the Spanish neologism "les", but like having the generic male "los" everywhere and lacking both "las" and "les".

You may not self-identify as a "minimalist", but its #1 lesson is general.

Here it is: Pick what to keep, not what to discard.

There's an 80/20 principle at work in most areas of life. For example, when decluttering, it's obvious which are the worst 20% and the best 20% of any collection, while the stuff in the middle takes effort to classify, sometimes extensive soul-searching.

If you try to declutter by looking specifically for "what you don't need", you'll wind up throwing away 20% and then of what's left, 20%, and then 20% of that, and so on.

Out of the original collection, the absolute fraction you keep slowly drops from 80% to 70% to 65%… in a process much slower than the opposite: picking out "what you definitely want to keep". Then right off the bat, the absolute fraction is down to 20%. This skips a lot of navel-gazing and soul-searching.

A different application: when cleaning your To-Do list, don't analyze each and every item, don't decide whether or not they still need doing. Just pick the few items you definitely, clearly need to do, copy them over to a new list, and forget about the rest.