Remove more things.
Remove more things.
Short essay on focus, simplicity and leverage.
“That’s been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
-Steve Jobs
More does not necessarily equal more. Humans think that adding more things will take them further. Additive changes (as opposed to subtractive ones) result in complication, inefficiency and fragility.
It takes skill and sophistication to do more with less. Reduction (simplification) is the path to achieving more and going further.
Scratch the surface, think outside the box. Invert your first thought to make it wiser and sharper. Doing via simplicity may be harder in the beginning, but when you achieve momentum, the upside is massive.
To achieve big things and go far you need leverage - not necessarily financial leverage in the form of debt, but all types and forms of leverage. Sometimes financial leverage could be intelligent, sometimes stupid. Go for the former.
Leverage can be found everywhere. Your aim however should be to find and extract asymmetric leverage - and the ability to focus is one such form of leverage.
Your target risk/reward should be multiples. This doesn’t mean you should go out and YOLO your capital (or time) on short-dated calls which either expire worthless or 50X your initial bet. What I am referring to is something more abstract and nuanced than that, not something superficial and first level.
Resources and time are not infinite. Therefore, it makes sense that the ultimate sophistication is simplicity. If you get more with more - what have you actually achieved? Not much.
Understand that the extraction of asymmetry is not something obvious or apparent. You need to develop skills, methods and strategies to see it and extract it.
Always seek to simplify rather than complicate, prefer to focus rather than scatter, and always go for for asymmetric leverage.
SUCCESS = simplicity + focus + asymmetric leverage
Great take, thank you!