One Single, Powerful Thought
Explore the transformation from complexity to simplicity in strategy. Learn from personal experiences, and valuable insights from Jobs, Holmes, and Buffet's 5/25 rule.
Strategy is not about adding more and more stuff.
Strategy is about taking stuff away.
Taking away everything, until there's only one thing left.
One single, powerful thought.
-- Dave Trott
This quote resonates deeply with me, and I want to share a bit of my personal journey that led me to truly understand its significance.
I've always been a person who believed in the power of 'more'. More ideas, more projects, more initiatives - I was convinced that this was the path to a successful strategy. I kept adding and adding, layer upon layer, believing that the more complex and comprehensive the strategy, the more effective it would be.
In my pursuit of 'more', I was spreading myself too thin, trying to be everywhere and do everything. And despite my best intentions, despite the long hours and the immense effort, the strategies I crafted often fell short of the mark. They looked impressive on paper, full of detail and extensive planning, but they didn't deliver the results I was aiming for.
Sherlock Holmes once said, "A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things". I see now how I was that fool, piling up 'lumber' in my strategies, trying to cover all bases, only to find myself missing the target.
The reality was a hard pill to swallow. I had failed, and it took a great deal of introspection to understand why. Steve Jobs captured the essence of simplicity when he said, "Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple". It was a difficult lesson to learn, but I gradually realized the truth in these words.
It made me realize that my approach to strategy was fundamentally flawed. I was so focused on adding that I had forgotten the importance of subtraction, of distilling everything down to a single, powerful thought.
The more experienced I became, the more I realized that the key to a successful strategy was not in its complexity but in its focus. The ability to pare down, to remove all the noise until you're left with one clear, potent idea - that's where true strategic power lies.
Here are a few tips I've learned along this journey:
Prioritize: Start by listing all the elements of your strategy. Then, critically evaluate each one. What's truly important? What's essential to your core objective?
Eliminate: Once you've identified the key elements, start eliminating the rest. It can be difficult to let go of ideas and initiatives you're attached to, but remember - less is more.
Focus: With your pared-down list, zero in on each element. Understand it deeply. This focused attention can lead to insights that might have been missed in a more cluttered strategy.
Iterate: Simplicity is not a one-and-done process. It's an ongoing cycle of review and refinement. Keep iterating on your strategy, always looking for ways to simplify further.
One tactic I really like to follow is Warren Buffet's 5/25 rule. I follow it in any sort of goal-setting, planning, and strategy sessions.
The Warren Buffett 5/25 rule is a productivity and prioritization strategy attributed to Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and business magnate. While the exact origin of the rule is not entirely agreed upon, it is widely known due to a conversation between Buffett and his personal pilot, Mike Flint.
Here is how the rule works:
List Your Goals: Begin by writing down a list of your top 25 career goals. These goals can be short-term or long-term.
Identify Top 5: Out of these 25 goals, decide on the five most important ones. You can select these goals based on their perceived value, meaning, relevance, results, or urgency.
Eliminate the Rest: Once you have identified the top 5 goals, eliminate the rest from your active list. This means crossing out the other 20 goals completely – they should not be put in the calendar, saved for a rainy day, or allowed to remain on the page. These are now your "Avoid-At-All-Cost" list until you've accomplished your top 5 goals.
Buffett's advice to Flint was that, in order to achieve his top goals, he must give zero attention to the "B-list" (i.e., the 20 goals not in the top 5). Only after completing his top goals could Flint revisit the B-list and repeat the process, creating a new A-list of five from the remaining goals.
I still grapple with this lesson every day. It's tempting to slip back into old habits, to believe that 'more' is the answer. But I remind myself that strategy, at its heart, is about focus. It's about taking away, not adding, until you're left with that one single, powerful thought. I remind myself of another quote from Steve Jobs: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep".
Sharing this is not easy. It's hard to admit to mistakes, to reveal vulnerability. But I believe it's important. If my journey can help even one person avoid the pitfalls I fell into, then it's a story worth telling.
Remember, in strategy and in life, less truly is more.