Something profound hit me this week. I want to share it with you because it will have an impact on your life. This is something we all need to consider.

First, I want to start this conversation with this quote:

Courage is the ability to act with limited knowledge, limited money, and limited experience.  Since, even in the best of all worlds, you will never have all the information, so it’s best to act.      –Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft

Subtraction seems to have been sucked out of our consciousness.  How often do you hear of regulators eliminating laws from the books, before replacing them with new laws?  How often do you remove software or apps from your electronic devices?  How often do you radically shrink the amount of “stuff” in your home and work-spaces?

As human beings, we are programmed toward addition.  We believe that more is better. We add space to our homes, then we get bigger homes, or public storage units.  We add photos, software, programs, links, and apps, to our devices by the truckload.  We add movies and music to our playlists.  We add products and people and likes and relationships to our lives.

My heartfelt question to you is this:  DO YOU HAVE THE COURAGE TO SUBTRACT?

My coach told me 20 years ago, that the more and more information that we are exposed to, is causing us to have less and less results. MORE is not the answer. LESS is the answer.  SUBTRACTION IS THE ANSWER!

Here are some questions to ponder?

Will you, or your family, or your businesses perform better if you decided to:

  1. Subtract weight from your body?
  2. Eliminate products and services that are hard to manage?
  3. Fire unproductive employees?
  4. Remove relationships from your life, that don’t work, even family relationships that are toxic?
  5. Removed yourself from “this life,” and decided to live a fully-expressed life, that is completely aligned with your purpose?
  6. Throw out TV sets, computers, and other electronic devices, that are holding you back, because of addictions?
  7. Stop drinking alcohol or doing drugs?
  8. Subtracted excuses from your life?
  9. Eliminated apps from your phone?
  10. Sold all the “toys” and demonstrations of wealth, that are no longer serving you?
  11. Resigned from boards, and non-profits, that may be a time suck.

What have you decided, that from THIS POINT FORWARD in your life, you would only make decisions COURAGEOUSLY ALIGNED WITH YOUR PURPOSE, YOUR VALUES, AND YOUR IMPORTANT LIFE OBJECTIVES?

This, my friends, is living a life of subtraction, NOT addition!

Here’s to the good life!

Rick Sapio