Last year, New York Times bestselling author Anne-Laure Le Cunff invited me to speak to her prestigious Ness Labs Community about one of my favourite topics:
The Subtraction Method.
The
training was a hit from what I remember and I got some thoughtful, curious questions during the session too.
But what did the training cover?
Well, it was all about the default Western belief that more effort = better
results. It’s a belief we can’t escape, whichever way we look and whatever way we turn. The belief has infiltrated the education system, the world of work and society at large just like a weed invades an English country garden.
On the training, I riffed on the idea that the belief isn't just faulty but is actually the CAUSE of many of the headaches the West
is trying to solve.
Hence the revised formula I shared:
Better results don’t come from more effort but from less interference instead.
Incidentally, I say the West because the East figured this out thousands of years ago.
Take the epic Eastern tome, The Tao Te Ching. I have a copy on my bookshelf here at Chateau Grundy annotated by the “Father of Motivation” himself, Wayne Dyer. And Verse 48 couldn’t put it any clearer
when it says “One who seeks knowledge learns something new every day. One who seeks wisdom unlearns something new every day”.
i.e. instead of “less interference”, The Tao Te Ching calls it “unlearning” (at least I think that’s the translation - I’m a bit rusty on my ancient Chinese).
Yet the West undeniably celebrates more effort and more knowledge as THE path to fame and glory. And when all the scrambling for more inevitably leads to a life that looks impressive from the outside but feels unbearable from the inside, the usual remedy is to add more still. So more time management routines, more boundaries, saying no more often and putting in even more effort to add even more knowledge
to figure out how to deal with the consequences of all the effort and knowledge which have been added already.
Which clearly is nuts and the very reason I said this “curse of more” is the cause of so many headaches in the West (both literal and figurative).
It’s not MORE which leads to the land of milk and honey.
It’s less.
If you’d like to put this into practice in your own life, you might like this:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
To fulfilment,
Tom