The power of subtracting

I came across an idea recently that made me stop and think.

Like many of us, I often have a long mental list of things I’d like to improve or explore.
A course I should take. A podcast to listen. A webinar to attend. A book to read. A project I want to start. A change I’ve been meaning to make. The list is long.

The exercise I heard about is simple.

Take a sheet of paper and write down 25 things you would like to achieve this year.

Then go through that list and circle the five you would focus on first if the time frame suddenly shrank to three months.

So far, this sounds like a normal prioritisation exercise.

But here’s the twist.

The remaining 20 items become your “avoidance list.”

Not your secondary priorities.

Your avoidance list.

In other words, the things most likely to distract you from the few goals that truly matter.

When I heard this, it struck a nerve.

Because most of us are not short of ambition.

We are short of focus.

We carry dozens of ideas, projects, and intentions at the same time.

Courses we want to take.
Plans we want to explore.
Changes we want to make.

And each one quietly competes for our attention.

The result is not just that we stay busy.

It’s that we end up doing many things poorly, instead of focusing long enough to make a few things truly meaningful.

Progress becomes diluted.

What I like about the avoidance list is that it forces honesty.

You cannot pursue everything at once.

If five things truly matter, the other twenty must wait.

And that discipline becomes even more important when you are trying to redesign your life.

Because building optionality doesn’t happen through scattered effort.

It happens through consistent focus on a small number of meaningful decisions.

Sometimes the most powerful step forward is not adding something new.

It’s deciding what you are willing to remove.