Diamonds in the Doodypoop

I’ve found myself using the phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” quite a bit. It’s a really useful phrase that warns against a specific type of preventable regret.

I want to come up with another phrase to use instead, at least some of the time, but I’m having a hard time coming up with something good. Check it out and see what I mean:

• Cutting off your nose to spite your face captures the idea of overreaction well, but this implies something that throwing out the baby with the bathwater doesn’t. Here, you’re doing something deliberately destructive, not careless.

• Burning bridges is similarly unsatisfying. It implies the carelessness of closing a door to your past, but baby/bathwater implies something more broad. When you burn a bridge, you can never return—a very specific type of baby/bathwater situation.

• Don’t lose sight of the forest for the trees is closer. It lets us know that we should be thinking about the big picture and not getting lost in the weeds, but instead of personal loss, we’re dealing with a lack of information that might lead to a baby/bathwater type situation.

None of these phrases nails it, and I’m starting to sound like a broken record here. I love having a phrase that invokes the idea of discarding value if you’re not too careful, but I also don’t want to throw out the diamonds in the doodypoop, if you know what I’m saying.

Why should throwing out the baby with the bathwater make such a memorable and irreplaceable cautionary phrase? I think there are three important ingredients here.

First, you need to spell out the clear message at the core of what you want to say. In this case, we’re saying that there might be something even more important to consider, and getting rid of that more important thing would be tragic. The baby/bathwater phrase warns you not to make this classic mistake.

Second, it has to be memorable if you’re going to grab it out of your mental library whenever you need it. One of my favorite ways to make something memorable is to make it absurd. The idea of discarding a baby you’re bathing simply because it’s time to get rid of the water is pretty silly when you get right down to it.

It’s also shocking, or at least it’s supposed to be. In other words, it gets your attention in the moment, causing you to truly consider your actions. This is the final ingredient: getting someone’s attention right now.

We humans are wired to keep babies alive, or else we wouldn’t be here. This phrase leverages evolutionary drives within us to be an effective and nearly universal way of describing this type of situation, even though the idea of throwing out bathwater seems ancient and antiquated.

That’s why I’ve decided to create my own phrase for this purpose. Instead of saying, “Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater here”, I might try out “Don’t discard the diamonds in the doodypoop” every now and then.

Diamonds are valuable, and the doodypoop is what you want to discard, but is this the best we can do? Can you come up with something better, or equally absurd? Is there a way to get the same idea across in a memorable and attention-grabbing way that doesn’t just stink?