The Best Part Is No Part

What SpaceX learned about engine design that also works for life.

By Peter Plötner. Aerospace engineer and Wayfinder Life Coach. More about Peter →

In 2024, SpaceX unveiled a new version of their main rocket engine.

The new engine, Raptor 3, is lighter than the one before it. It is more powerful. It is more reusable. By almost every metric that matters in spaceflight, it is better.

It is also missing a lot of parts.

Earlier versions of the engine had a heat shield. Raptor 3 does not. Earlier versions had a fire suppression system. Raptor 3 does not. Earlier versions had a tangle of external plumbing and wiring that one observer called the “Christmas tree.” Most of that is gone too, folded back inside the body of the engine. Hundreds of bolted joints have been welded shut or eliminated entirely.

The engineers there have a phrase for this approach. They call it the best part is no part.

The best part is no part. The component you don't have to design. Don't have to test. Don't have to manufacture. Don't have to inspect. Don't have to repair when it fails. Don't have to certify when the rules change. The component that contributes zero mass to the rocket because it doesn't exist.

I have been thinking about that phrase for a long time. I think it might be one of the most important things I have ever read about how to live.

What we are trained to do

We are trained, almost from birth, to add. Add a habit. Add a skill. Add a friend. Add a subscription. Add a goal. Add a productivity system. Add another book to the pile. Add a side project. Add a bigger house. Add a pool. Add an early morning. Add a late night. Add, add, add.

The whole architecture of modern self-improvement is additive. Every app on your phone is a part you have installed in your life. Every commitment in your calendar is a part. Every relationship you maintain out of habit, every recurring meeting nobody questions anymore, every goal you adopted ten years ago and never re-examined, every belief about what a “successful” life looks like that arrived in your head before you were old enough to evaluate it.

These are all parts. Each one weighs something. Each one needs maintenance. Each one introduces a small possibility of failure.

Imagine if SpaceX had approached engine design the way most of us approach our lives. Let's add a redundant cooling system. And another. And a backup heat shield. And a more sophisticated fire suppression system, and a backup for that. Just to be safe. The engine would weigh too much to fly. Some of the things we add to our lives are like that. They make the rocket so heavy it can't lift off. Every added part is also another way for it to fail. We wonder why we feel stuck.

The deletion move runs in the opposite direction. It asks, of every part of your life: do I actually need this? Or is it just here because nobody questioned it?

My own list

Here, partially in chronological order, is what I have deleted from my life over the years. None of it was easy. Some of it took me years to do. All of it made the rocket lighter.

I deleted television. I almost never watch it now. Years ago I noticed that most of the time I sat in front of a screen, I felt slightly worse afterward than before. The signal was clear. I just didn't want to read it for a long time. Reading it would have meant sitting with my own thoughts and feelings instead of escaping into a screen. That is harder than it looks. So the screen kept winning, until it didn't.

I am still working on YouTube, which is the same problem with a more sophisticated coat of paint.

I deleted alcohol, mostly. Not for any noble reason. I noticed that a lot of the times I drank, it was because I felt obliged to drink. The drink wasn't the point. The fitting in was the point. Once I saw that clearly, the drink stopped tasting good. Now I drink occasionally, when I actually want to, which turns out to be rare.

I deleted my daily chocolate bar or scoop of ice cream. For years I ate one almost every day, the way some people drink coffee. I don't anymore.

I deleted networking and networking events. I used to go to a lot of them. The implicit promise was always that the next one might contain the conversation that changed something. Most of the time, I just came home tired with three new business cards I would never look at again. I now ask, before any optional professional commitment: will this likely help me in the next 12 to 18 months? Most of the time the honest answer is no. So I don't go.

I deleted volleyball, which was harder. I genuinely loved playing. But the times that worked for the team were not the times that worked for my kids. For this season of my life, the kids matter more. I miss it. That is allowed. The deletion was still right.

The biggest deletion of my life, though, was a startup. I worked for nearly three years on a search engine that helped non-profits find funding. I cared about the problem. I had partners. I had momentum. I had spent so much time on it that the idea of stopping felt physically painful, the way ending a long relationship feels physically painful even when you know it is the right call.

I stopped anyway. It took me months to do it. When I finally did, I was about thirty thousand euros in debt and starting from zero again. I had to delete a version of myself that had been running, in the background, for years. I am the kind of person who builds successful companies. That sentence, attached to that specific company, had to come out.

It was the right call. The deletion freed up something I could not have named at the time. Years later, in the empty space where that startup used to be, something quieter and truer to me showed up. I'll come back to that in a moment, because it is the clearest example I have of why the rule that follows actually matters.

The belief I had to delete

The hardest deletion is rarely a thing. It is usually a belief.

For a long time, I quietly believed that education and earnings would track each other smoothly all the way up. The more degrees, the more income. I was very good at the education game. So I kept playing.

What I now believe, with the benefit of more years and more data, is that the curve flattens hard somewhere around a master's degree. The premium for a master's over a bachelor's has been compressing for years, and a meaningful share of master's programs deliver no real financial return at all. The doctorate I worked so hard for did not double my earning power. It opened some doors. It also closed others.

What kept growing past that point, what really separated the people whose careers and lives flourished, was something my schooling never tried to teach me. The work of Daniel Goleman and others has shown, over and over, that emotional intelligence accounts for the large majority of what moves people up at higher levels of leadership, once technical skill is roughly even. Technical skill is the entry ticket. After that, the differentiator is how well you read yourself and other people.

I had been pouring years into the entry-ticket side, and putting almost nothing into the differentiator side. I had to delete the belief that I was on the right path just because I had been on it for a long time.

That deletion cost me more than the startup. The startup cost me money and three years. The deleted belief cost me something subtler. Most of those years were not wasted. The training was real. The skills were real. I would not give back my years in aerospace, the doctorate, the technical foundation, any of it. But there was a quiet, parallel hemisphere of my life that I left almost completely untrained. Five years, maybe a little more, of even modest investment in emotional and interpersonal skills, started in my twenties instead of my mid-thirties, would have changed almost everything downstream. There was no refund for that one. Just a slow, careful pivot toward the work I should have started alongside, much earlier.

The 10% rule

Here is the rule that makes deletion safe. The SpaceX version goes like this. If you don't end up adding back at least 10% of what you deleted, you didn't delete enough.

The point is not to delete maximally. The point is to delete enough that you can see what was actually load-bearing.

In my own life, the most useful add-back has been independent project work. After my startup failed, I deleted “being an entrepreneur” as an identity. Then I deleted two follow-on projects, one on visually summarizing books, one on automating bureaucratic documents. By the time I was done deleting, I had decided I just was not the kind of person who builds independent things outside of a regular job.

That turned out to be wrong. I had over-deleted.

A few years later, almost by accident, I started training as a coach. Coaching is, among other things, an independent project. It has all the freedom and risk of a startup, just with a different shape. But this time it stuck for a reason the previous attempts had not. Coaching comes from somewhere genuinely intrinsic in me. It gives me energy instead of taking it. The effort itself is the reward. I have no plans to abandon it.

That is the 10% I added back. Not “being an entrepreneur” as an identity. Just one specific piece of it, the part I had thrown out with the rest. The part that was actually mine all along.

If you have deleted aggressively from your own life, you should expect to add some of it back. Not all of it. Maybe none of any single thing. But you will probably find, six months in, that there is one piece you genuinely miss. Not the piece you assumed you would miss. A different one. Add that piece back. Leave the rest gone.

Why deletion is so hard

Most of the friction around deletion is not in the deleting. It is in the people around you.

When I told my grandparents I had stopped my startup and taken a job at a large company, they were quietly relieved. The startup years had worried them. The 9-to-5 made sense to them in a way the entrepreneurship never had. From their generation's spec sheet, I had finally come to my senses.

When I started spending real money on coaching education, the reaction was different. There was concern. Was this a serious investment, or a midlife flight from engineering? Was I drifting? The same people who had been relieved when I stopped the startup were not relieved when I started training in something they had no frame for.

When my wife and I decided to move from Germany to French Guiana with two small children, leaving family who would now see the kids only occasionally, the reactions were even more layered. Worry. Some hurt. Some quiet disagreement that we did not always hear directly.

I tell you this not to complain. The people around me were responding with care. They wanted me safe. They wanted the kids near. Their reactions were not malicious. They were love, expressed in the form of a vote for whatever they understood as stable.

But here is what nobody tells you about deletion. The world is set up to reward addition and quietly punish subtraction. When you add, almost everyone celebrates. New job, new title, new house, new project, new commitment, new ring, new baby, new degree. When you subtract, even when the subtraction is the healthiest thing you have done in years, the room gets quieter.

This is the part most self-help writing skips. People do not just struggle to delete because deletion is intellectually hard. They struggle because every social system they live in is set up to reward the opposite move.

Knowing that is half the work. The other half is doing it anyway.

Try this week

Pick something. Almost anything.

A recurring meeting nobody questions. A subscription that auto-renews and you never use. A social commitment you have been quietly dreading. A goal you set five years ago and have stopped believing in. A drink at a work dinner that you don't actually want. A weekend obligation that drains you every time. An app that has been on your home screen for three years and never made your life better.

Look at it carefully. Ask: if this didn't exist in my life starting tomorrow, would I really miss it?

If the honest answer is no, or even probably not, that is a candidate for deletion.

Here is the small experiment. For the next week, just do not do that one thing. Don't announce it. Don't make a big move. Don't replace it with something else. Just leave the empty space empty for a week and see what happens.

Most likely, nothing will happen. The world will not collapse. You will have a small piece of energy you didn't have before. You will learn something about how much of your life is held up by sheer momentum.

Then, after a week, ask: did I miss this enough to add it back?

If yes, add it back. The 10% version.

If no, leave it gone. You just made the rocket lighter. You can fly a little higher now.

The best part is no part. The best meeting is no meeting. The best obligation is no obligation. The best commitment is the one you actually want to keep.

You are not lazy for wanting fewer things in your life. You are not failing by removing what isn't working. You are doing exactly what good engineers do when they finally let themselves see clearly. You are deleting the part. And the part that is left, at last, can fly.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't this just minimalism by another name?

Related, but different framing. Minimalism is about owning less. The best part is no part is about asking, of any commitment or belief or routine, whether it earns its place. Some of mine do. Some don't. The criterion is fit, not count.

What if I delete something and immediately regret it?

Then you found a load-bearing piece. Add it back, but smaller. The 10% rule exists for exactly this. You do not have to be perfect on the first cut. You have to be willing to cut, and then willing to honestly notice what you missed.

How do I get the people around me to support deletion?

You probably can't, and that is okay. Most of them are responding with care, not malice. Their model of you was built on the parts you are now removing. Give it time. Don't argue. Show what the lighter version looks like. Most people come around once they see the result.

What's the difference between deleting and giving up?

Giving up is when you stop because the thing got hard. Deleting is when you stop because the thing isn't yours, or isn't earning its place anymore. The difference lives in the criterion, not in how it looks from the outside.

Where do I start if my whole life feels like too many parts?

Start with one low-cost thing. A subscription. A meeting. An app. Don't try to delete the big ones first. Get comfortable with the move on something small. Confidence in deletion compounds the same way confidence in anything else does, by use.

This is step two of the five-step process I write about in Stop Optimizing Your Life. Start Specifying It. Step one (questioning the requirement) and step two (deletion) are where most of the leverage lives. If this hit something for you, the Essential Self Diagnostic is fifteen questions that take sixty seconds. A starting point for noticing which parts of your life would not survive an honest second look.