This happens annually during Chile's winter period from late June through early September when the trees have put themselves into hibernation.

(The trees are starting to wake up and produce flowers as you can see in this video, and we finished the last of the pruning over the weekend.)

Pruning trees is a little like you might imagine carving up a miniature Japanese bonsai; we literally cut entire branches off to sculpt and shape each tree in a way that maximizes incoming sunlight and fruit production.

It's counterintuitive, but pruning actually aids a plant's long-term growth.

When left un-pruned, trees will become massive beasts with unwieldy, complex networks of branches that hardly produce any fruit at all and succumb to disease.

Our species works the same way.

In order to maximize our own potential, we must constantly assess what's working and reduce complexity by pruning what is wasteful and unnecessary.