Subtraction is Mastery – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Time and Space Are Limited

I deleted all my tweets on the first of the month.

Shortly after, I turned on Freedom and started a social media / new input fast.

As this month continued, and I didn’t spend as much time on social, I realized a few things:

Our days, while seemingly “packed” are often that way because we are always reacting
Changing our habits come with a cost.
Removing one thing tends to make something else take its place.

I want to focus on the last learning with this post because it is something I didn’t foresee.

When I removed my social and laid that stake in the ground, almost every one of my habits felt some consequence.

My gym habit increased – now I go four times a week
My junk food intake increased because social media is an anxiety panacea
YouTube. I’ve watched a lot more YouTube lately. Don’t know where to place this.

It was a reminder that we are all walking around the world functioning as a system. We don’t know the consequences of changing.

Next time, when cutting something major out, it makes sense to have new habits ready to go. That energy has to go somewhere. I better be intentional dealing with it.

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09/03/2017 – Intellectual vs Emotional
09/10/2017 – Gratitude v Entitlement
09/17/2017 – We Don’t Know What Someone Else Is Going Through
09/24/2017 – Failure Comes With The Job

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Take Away Something

In February, we talked about Priorities.

Priorities are important because they lay out what is important to us. Declaring them give people an idea of who you are and what you stand for.

That is great. Making a priority is a tactic. A powerful tactic, but a tactic nonetheless. What is the strategy behind it?

Well, that is the concept I want to explore this month.

That concept is the idea of mastery is a focus, and getting to focus is all about subtraction.

To say it simpler – Mastery = Subtraction.

So in September, we will be exploring just that idea.

This month’s theme ties into “execution.”

At the end of last year, I wrote a newsletter highlighting the “three tenets of leadership.” Each month, I take a topic related to one of the three tenets and write about my ideas and experience around the topic.

Reread candidate

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham – One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from reading Jay Abraham is the power of being clear about the priorities of your business. It makes everything else clear.