Resolution as Subtraction
Obsessing Over Less Might Be the Most Productive Move You Make This Year
Not sure about you, but I’m coasting into resolution season on fumes. On one hand, there’s WIRE, brimming with energy and possibility. On the other, 2025 was a draining year in other parts of my work life, which has me ready for a long nap. If you can relate, let’s resolve to approach 2026 differently.
Let’s make this the year we obsess over subtraction.
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I’ve anchored to this quote throughout my design career. On the surface, it seems to be about minimalism, but a better word might be essentialism. What can we strip away, until all that’s left is what truly matters?
Less noise and hustle, more intention and clarity.
A frame of subtraction can be useful in a job search. As employers ask more of candidates, the pressure to keep adding skills, certifications, and credentials to our résumés is real. I would never suggest not seeking to improve, but the question should be: at what cost?
If you’ve lived in a mountain town (ahem, Boulder) or running city (cough, Boston), you have seen first-hand the pressure these places put on people to be good at everything. You arrive as one thing, then keep adding sports, hobbies, and disciplines to your “portfolio” until one day, in pursuit of more, you have lost touch with your original passion altogether.
Relentlessly adding is a recipe for burnout and puts us at risk of forgetting what we love about what we do. To avoid that fate in our careers (and at the same time, actually perform better), we have to do one critical thing:
Ruthlessly remove the inessential.
It sounds like I’m taking away the pizza party. But by cutting the fluff and distraction, we can focus. With focus comes growth, and with growth comes satisfaction for you, efficiency and effectiveness for your employer. That’s what they’re really after with the pizza party anyway.
“What separates those who succeed from those who don’t at each level is not their ceiling but their floor. The floor defines what you don’t do.” — The Science of Scaling (Blake Erickson, Dr. Benjamin Hardy)
The Science of Scaling is about growing a business, but its central idea can also be applied to career or personal growth. The idea is this: What we don’t do has as much impact on our success and happiness as what we do.
As the authors put it, “The core element of jumping to a higher level of performance and results in any discipline is raising your floor, which means stripping out what no longer fits, even if it did before.”
In the seminal Slow Productivity, Cal Newport adds practical, tactical detail to the essentialist approach. He calls on us to make progress on meaningful work not by doing more things faster, but by doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, and fixating on quality.
That last point is the crux. Subtraction isn’t a retreat. It’s a prerequisite for doing good work over the long haul. At the start of a new year, that’s a useful strategy to carry into a job search.
If there’s a resolution worth keeping, it might be this: less but better. Fewer commitments, chosen deliberately. A raised floor. Higher standards for what stays. And enough space left over to remember why the work mattered to you in the first place.
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