Extreme Subtraction: Eliminate Everything.

The more I play with this idea the more convinced I am that it’s the most powerful operation doctrine ever devised. Extreme Subtraction is exactly what it sounds like: removing everything that doesn’t matter. It’s closest parallel would be the idea of Essentialism by Greg McKeown, but it’s so much more than that. There are a few books that have shaped me more than any others: The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, Getting Things Done by David Allen, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco, and The War of Art and Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield.

Turning Pro, the less well known sequel to The War of Art is about overcoming resistance. Resistance is the force that repels you whenever you’re attempting to do something great like: starting a business, writing a book, or making a sale. The solution, Pressfield says is to turn pro. To stop confronting your work as an amateur would and to shift your mindset to become someone who executes day-in, day-out like a professional. In the second half of this book, Pressfield contrasts the Amateur and the Professional in a series of short, pithy chapters no more than a few pages each. One of those chapters expresses the heart and soul of Extreme Subtraction so I wanted to share it with you:

“…none of us was writing a real novel, or painting a real painting, or starting a real business. We were amateurs living in the past or dreaming of the future, while failing utterly to do the work necessary to progress in the present.

When you turn pro, your life gets very simple.

The Zen monk, the artist, the entrepreneur often lead lives so plain they’re practically invisible. Miyamoto Musashi’s dojo was smaller than my living room. Things became superfluous for him. In the end he didn’t even need a sword…

…Turning pro is an act of self-abnegation. Not Self with a capital-S, but little-s self. Ego. Distraction. Displacement. Addiction.”

The key to rapid progress and massive results is to remove all superfluous energy and action. This idea completely took hold of me and I’ve been in love with it ever since. Another idea I write about often is The Power Law—the 80/20 rule on steroids—is the idea that only a handful of factors (or investments) generate the vast majority of your results. Gary Keller calls it Extreme Pareto—the 99/1 rule.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s about stripping away what doesn’t matter.

There were a few mistakes I made on this early on. I stripped too much away. For example, in my outreach messages I included such little detail that there was no resonance. Imagine a song that only lasted 24 seconds. There’s hardly enough time to form a bond with the music—or in the case of outreach, to get emotionally involved with an idea.

Rather than the micro, I would instead recommend zooming out and cutting large activities that sap your time from above. For example, if I’m not careful I can spend hours on YouTube watching documentaries, keeping up with politics, or reading books. I use an application called Self-Control that blocks all of my websites for a certain period of time—and unlike other blocker apps there is no password or bypass.

Once you get the big obvious distractions out of the way you’ll notice that much of what’s left over is not as necessary as you realized. For example, it’s tempting to book 30 minute meetings to work through a problem. Perhaps sometimes that’s required, but more often than not you end up inflating the time it takes you to complete a task to the time you allotted for it—also known as Parkinson’s Law. This is why setting super short deadlines is so exciting. It fights this tendency and has the added benefit of getting you out of your own head. It also allows you to make contact with the marketplace and iterate quickly.

Here’s one of the ways this shows up for me: I don’t spend very long in meetings to an almost absurd degree. I try not to book meetings in the first place, and once I’m in one, I try and remove all superfluous elements and focus on whatever needs to be done.

As a counterpoint, I recently read Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. The thesis of his book is that in the knowledge economy, we’ve been brainwashed into filling 8 hours every with “productive” time and that the way to resist this is to focus on being productive a few hours a day and make consistent progress towards a goal. I would agree with that hypothesis, but I think the word slow can be elaborated on. There’s an expression in the military: slow is smooth, smooth is fast—rather than trying to do something quickly and making errors, do it as slowly and as smoothly as you can. This is a liberating idea, because it pushes back against the tendency to be quick for the sake of it while also encouraging you to respect your time.

For example, if the objective of a call is to solve Problem X, then solve Problem X as quickly as possible and get off the call. If the objective of a call is to spend quality time together, then set aside time to do that and catch up. Cal Newport calls this High-Quality Leisure. When we try and be leisurely during a period that doesn’t require it, things get messy. When you’re working work, when you’re playing play.

One last idea worth mentioning: in my view there is a metaphorical “Price” that must be paid to get whatever result you want. You need to pay it. Nothing more, nothing less. Your job is to pay that price with as few steps as possible—and to be proud of it. That might mean that sometimes you spend hours in a meeting because that’s what it demands. But you are always looking for superfluous elements and trying to strip them down. The maxim of Extreme Subtraction would be: maximum result, minimum effort.

Here are a handful of questions you can ask yourself to start applying this idea in your life ASAP: What can I stop doing right now? What actions or choices are not serving me? Where am I not respecting my time? How can I deliver better quality, with less effort? How can I maximize results while minimizing effort? What is the one task that drives the biggest results for me? How can I optimize around that task?