"Pursuing 'the good' can choke out 'the great'."

I was in a strategy meeting last month where the leadership team had just finished their annual planning session. They were buzzing with excitement about all the opportunities they'd identified for the coming year.

Twenty-three initiatives. Seventeen new markets. Twelve product improvements. Eight process upgrades.

"Brilliant," I said. "Now which three are you actually going to do?"

The room went quiet.

The Addition Addiction

"Lots of things in life are not necessarily wrong they are simply not necessary."

We live in a culture obsessed with more. More features, more services, more markets, more everything. But here's what I've learned after working with hundreds of businesses: success isn't about what you add - it's about what you subtract.

Think about Apple. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, the company was dying under the weight of too many products. His first act? Cut the product line from dozens of items to just four. Sales exploded.

"Pruning the 'bad' and even the 'good' is required in order to develop the 'best'."

The Tomato Plant Principle

"You have to tend your tomato plants to produce fruit, but you don't have to do anything to produce dandelions; they grow by themselves when you neglect your garden."

I love this analogy because it captures something crucial about business growth. Good ideas, like weeds, grow everywhere. Great results, like prize tomatoes, require deliberate cultivation.

Every gardener knows that pruning feels wrong. You're cutting away healthy growth, removing branches that could bear fruit. But experienced gardeners also know that unpruned plants produce lots of small, weak fruit instead of fewer, better ones.

The same principle applies to business. Every opportunity you don't pursue, every feature you don't build, every market you don't enter creates space for excellence in the areas you do choose.

The Discipline of Saying No

"While pruning is not pleasant, it is absolutely essential for authentic growth."

I worked with a consultancy that was struggling despite having talented people and willing clients. The problem? They said yes to everything. Website design, training delivery, recruitment, coaching, strategy consulting - if someone would pay for it, they'd do it.

They were busy, but they weren't building anything. No reputation, no expertise, no sustainable advantage.

We spent a painful morning identifying their core strength - leadership development - and agreeing to stop everything else. Within six months, they'd doubled their day rates and had a waiting list of clients.

The Focus Multiplier

"Direction is more important than speed. Every mile in the wrong direction is a two mile error back to where we were to begin with."

Here's what most people miss about focus: it's not just about doing fewer things - it's about the compound effect of doing fewer things well.

When you spread your resources across ten priorities, each gets 10% of your attention. When you focus on three priorities, each can get 30% - but the real magic happens when they start reinforcing each other.

I think about Amazon's early days. They could have expanded into dozens of product categories immediately. Instead, they focused obsessively on books. This gave them time to perfect their logistics, customer service, and technology. When they did expand, they had systems that could handle anything.

The Subtraction Strategy

So how do you decide what to cut?

Start with your vision. "We must have a clear and compelling vision that we keep front of mind constantly." Everything that doesn't serve this vision is a candidate for removal.

Apply the 80/20 rule. Which 20% of your activities generate 80% of your results? What would happen if you stopped the other 80%?

Consider opportunity cost. It's not just about whether something's worth doing - it's about whether it's worth doing instead of something else.

Test and measure. "No discipline seems pleasant at the time. Later on it produces a harvest for those who have been trained by it." Track what happens when you stop doing things.

The Courage to Cut

"There are times when you must tell it like it is and accept the consequences including others' disapproval."

The hardest part of strategic subtraction isn't identifying what to cut - it's having the courage to actually do it. Someone's pet project, a client's favourite feature, a service that's "always been part of what we do."

I remember helping a software company discontinue a product that was losing money. The development team was devastated - they'd worked on it for years. But six months later, they thanked me. The energy they'd been pouring into a failing product was now focused on their core offering, which had become market-leading.

The Multiplication Effect

"Whatever your life is rooted to - is what you will draw your strength from."

Here's the beautiful paradox of subtraction: when you do less, you often achieve more. Not just because you're more focused, but because you're building depth instead of breadth.

The companies I most admire aren't the ones trying to be everything to everyone - they're the ones who've chosen their battles carefully and fight them brilliantly.

Ready to discover what you should stop doing? Our business health check can help you identify where you're spreading yourself too thin and where you should be concentrating your efforts. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is decide what not to do.