Scientific American recently had a post with this headline “Our Brain overlooks this Brilliant Problem-Solving Strategy”.

One of the key points of the post was “People often limit their creativity by continuously adding new features to a design rather than removing existing ones”.

Digest this line. It is a powerful one.

In essence, it means “More is Less and Less is More”.

How do we make Less = More?

How do we make Less work for us?

The answer lies in Essentialism. What are the essentials that truly work magic for us? Double down or even Triple Down on the essentials. Double Down means strengthening your commitment to a particular strategy or activity.

I have often explained a similar point to many, “The strength of a product lies in not only what it has but more importantly in what it does not have”.

People generally complicate things by adding more features. We think more features mean more value.

The real equation is:

Essential Features = More Value

If 5 features provide 95% of the client value, adding 20 more to add another 5% is foolishness as adding the other features will most likely dilute the User Experience. Yes, you can always improve the product but learn to be ruthless with editing.

However, editing or removing something is a difficult task. It does not come intuitively to us. We need to put in effort to THINK. Our Brain must actually Work on something we are not used to.

Editing or Subtracting the Non-Essentials is a Skill, and it will pay huge dividends for you and your firm.

Saying NO to a Prospect is difficult, so we end up taking prospects we do not enjoy or who might not be right for your firm or even clients who we might not be able to devote real time to.

Say NO to a meeting where you are not required. Once you get good at this, you will learn how to protect your Time Capital and over a period of time become a MASTER of Saying NOs to wasteful things and activities.

One of the things I did way back was to FIRE myself from becoming a bottleneck in the firm. This is a hard thing to do for most control freaks but an essential thing to build a world class firm.

What will you EDIT Today?