In order to add, you need to subtract!

Few days after I started blogging, I shared my blog with one of my professors. I am very fond of this professor and respect and admire him greatly. I was also very happy to know that he took some time out and went through my blog.

He also shared some of his thoughts after reading one of my posts on happiness. He said “I’m a believer that we must strive to SUBTRACT something from our lives when we decide to ADD something new to our lives. If we don’t SUBTRACT, our lives become too cluttered and we can’t devote the proper amount of time to any one aspect of our lives which may bring us some happiness. Without at least some SUBTRACTION, we tend to live on the periphery of our lives rather than in the center of our lives.”

On reading it, I reflected back on my life and wondered whether imbalance due to addition of things/tasks had ever been my lifestyle? What I discovered was shocking! There were many incidents when I tried to cram everything in a short period of time. I wanted to learn foreign languages and at the same time wanted to learn a new sport, spend time on reading self-help books, learn a new software, become a Toastmaster, spend time in community service and of course wanted to start blogging too! I always found myself confused, guilty for not being able to devote time to all the tasks and all this eventually led to unhappiness.

It was enlightening to read what my professor had said. From then on I decided to subtract a lot of things from my life and focus on the key aspects. Just a few days after that, I came across another article on the web, a part of which talks about the same concept of subtracting things. This article written by Guy Kawasaki is a Q & A with Mathew E. May and is titled – In Pursuit of Elegance: 12 Indispensable Tips. To read the entire article, you might want to visit this page.

I have included a part of the article that is relevant to this topic.

Question: What’s the first step a CEO should take to get her company on the right track?

Answer: When Fortune named Apple “America’s Most Admired Company” as well as “Most Admired for Innovation,” honors owing largely to the success of the iPhone, Steve Jobs revealed that a “stop-doing” strategy figured centrally into Apple’s approach. What he said was: “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.” That’s the mindset.

And step one? Create a solid stop-doing list. Sounds simple, but few do it. Guru Jim Collins says you absolutely must have a “stop-doing” list to accompany your to-do list. As a practical matter, he advises developing a strong discipline around first giving careful thought to prioritizing goals and objectives, and then eliminating the bottom 20 percent of the list. If as CEO you do that, and demand that everyone do that, including designers and engineers with respect to the stuff they’re building, your ugly crap quotient goes way down.

Do you now realize how important it is to start subtracting or creating a stop-doing list? I have found immense peace in my life by implementing this principle. If you think that at present your life is too cluttered then you might want to consider this option. Please share your results in case you implement this simple concept in your cluttered life.

To a balanced life!

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