Addition by Subtraction
This week I'm getting better by doing less.
Getting better by doing less.
I just got back from a business conference where I did something unusual for me: I barely took notes.
Most conferences bury you in information. You fly home with dozens of pages of cryptic handwritten notes, a laundry list of new tactics, and the vague guilt of knowing you won’t implement any of them.
This time, I decided it would be better to leave with fewer commitments than I arrived with.
Here are five things I’m thinking about this week:
1. Reduced by Rick Rubin
The best session I attended was titled “(Re)ducer.” It was built around a detail from music producer Rick Rubin’s career. On his first album credit, LL Cool J’s Radio, the liner notes read “Reduced by Rick Rubin,” instead of “produced.”
Rubin’s job was to strip away everything that obscured the music, not to add more. He explained the credit years later by saying there’s tremendous power in using the least amount of information needed to get a point across.
In the session, we were encouraged to apply that idea to our own lives.
What would your work look like if your job title was Reducer?
I came home with a short list of things to cut instead of a long list of new things to start doing.
If you want to try it, pick one area of your life that feels heavy. Perhaps it’s your calendar or your list of active projects. Write down each appointment or project, then ask yourself one question:
If this disappeared tomorrow, would anything real break?
If your answer for an item is no, cut it.
I feel lighter already.
2. Discipline, motivation, and a third thing
We usually frame getting things done as a fight between motivation and discipline. I watched a Chris Williamson video this week, which adds a third fuel source: obsession.
Discipline means you make yourself do the thing. Motivation means you want to do the thing. Obsession means you can’t not do the thing.
This resonated with me because it rewrote some of my own history. What I remembered as periods of massive motivation were really periods of obsession. Nobody had to push me. I couldn’t have stopped if I tried.
It’s also why I love the word nerd. A nerd is obsessed with something and doesn’t care how other people perceive them. You don’t have to be into technical things to qualify. You can be a nerd about anything.
I love nerds.
The connection to the idea of being a Reducer is what got me. You can’t manufacture obsession, but you can uncover it. It tends to be the thing still standing after you subtract everything else.
3. Five things, now in video form
While I was away, I published a video version of one of the most popular pieces I’ve written here: 5 Things World-Class Engineers Do (That You Don’t). If you prefer watching to reading, or know someone who does, this is the version to share.
My favorite moment comes from Kun Chen, who reached E7 at Meta and partner level at Microsoft. He told me most people wait for a stalled promotion to discover they’ve stopped growing. But by then, they’ve already lost a year.
His fix is to ask himself the same question every month:
What did I do this month that I couldn’t do last month?
There’s also a sixth thing at the end of the video. With how fast this industry is changing, it may be the only one that matters in five years.
If you’ve already seen the first five, the follow-up went out while I was traveling: 5 More Things World-Class Engineers Do (That You Don’t). The second batch is subtler than the first, and a few of them sting.
4. Ethan Evans on the work that doesn’t matter
My new podcast episode with Ethan Evans is live. Ethan is a former Amazon VP who helped build Prime Video and Twitch. He asked a question I haven’t stopped thinking about:
What were you doing last Tuesday morning? Did it matter?
Most of us have no idea. When we go back and look, the answer is usually humbling: a meeting that could have been an email, or perhaps a report nobody has opened, since the director who requested it left the company.
Ethan spent years trying to kill Mechanical Turk inside Amazon. He failed. Other people tried, and failed. At times, even the team that owned it didn’t want to work on it. The project survived anyway.
If a company full of brilliant people can’t let go of work they no longer believe in, ask yourself what you’re still carrying that you stopped believing in a long time ago.
That question is maybe five percent of the episode. We also talk about asking for a raise. Only 30% of people ever ask. Ethan gives a simple script that works. He also says the quiet part out loud about whether managers lie. He’s more honest about it on the record than almost anyone at his level has been.
5. From a reader
I want to share this email that landed in my inbox (it has been lightly edited):
“Thanks so much for your book! It helped me immensely in my interview process, where I’m starting my highest salary role to date. The concrete steps really helped me craft stories from the soul of my work in a way my panel could understand, and be my most human self. Your content helped unparalyze me from months of overwhelming AI advice (I was speaking so robotically, and at one point reading off a script). I went from 12+ poorly rounded interviews to absolute thrill and excitement, clearly sharing my past examples.”
The line about AI advice stuck with me. This reader had access to infinite information, and it had paralyzed them. What worked for them was less, delivered with intent. Addition by subtraction, one more time.
If you have interviews coming up and you want the concrete steps this reader used, the book is here: Technical Behavioral Interview: An Insiders Guide
That’s it for this week. If one of these lands with you, reply and tell me which one. I read every response.