A Little Less This Monday

Please forward this to a high-impact leader who needs the energy edge. If this was forwarded to you, get plugged in here.

Welcome back - it's nice to have you here!

Before we dive in...

Today, Monday, October 12th, is Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

Normally, this is where I’d give you something to think about: an idea about leadership, energy, decisions, identity, or one of the invisible forces shaping how we operate. Today, I want to do something a little different.

Instead of adding another framework to your Monday, I want to subtract one.

🎯 THE MOMENT

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an opportunity to recognize the histories, cultures, contributions, resilience, and continued presence of Indigenous peoples. It’s also an opportunity to pay closer attention to the stories many of us inherited about the history of the places we call home.

I’m not going to pretend I’m the person who should teach that history. But I can choose to make a little more room for it. And maybe that's a worthwhile invitation for today.

Learn something about the Indigenous people and history of where you live. Listen to someone whose experience is different from yours. Support work in your community that matters to you. Volunteer if you have the opportunity. Help someone who could use it.

Or simply take some of the space you might normally fill with work, noise, or another item on the list and look around.

Where could your attention be useful? Where could your time be useful? Where could you be useful?

⚡ QUICK SPIN

Not every open space needs to be filled.

That’s a surprisingly difficult idea to practice. Especially for ambitious people.

An empty hour becomes an opportunity to catch up. An open spot on the calendar becomes another meeting. A quiet moment gets a screen. A little extra capacity becomes permission to take on something else.

We’re very good at adding. Sometimes the more useful move is to leave the space open long enough to notice what was already there.

Maybe that’s another person. A community. A history we never learned. A conversation we’ve been too busy to have.

Or simply the realization that our attention doesn’t always need to point toward the next thing we’re trying to accomplish.

🛠️ MY TURN

So I’m not giving you a framework today.

No five-step system. No audit. No new concept to remember.

Just one question:

What could you subtract today that would give you more room to notice, learn, or contribute?

You don’t need to reply and tell me.

Go use the space. ❤️

Cheers,
Adam

👉 adamwbarney.com

P.S. Yes, I recognize the irony of sending you an email about subtraction. 😂 So I’m going to take my own advice and stop here.

🔌 STAY PLUGGED IN

Okay, almost. 😂 Because the timing of this week’s Is Anything Real? conversation feels almost too perfect. My friend Nell Derick Debevoise has been thinking deeply about subtraction and challenging an assumption a lot of ambitious people carry:

Success is additive.

More effort. More output. More commitments. More optimization.

What happens when we stop automatically asking what else we should add and start examining what we might release instead?

Nell calls the practice systematic subtraction. It’s not about lowering your ambition or pretending responsibilities don’t exist. It’s about looking at the whole system and experimenting with what can be released, then paying attention to what changes elsewhere.

Her TEDx talk on subtraction went live recently, and rather than add my explanation on top of hers, I’ll let Nell take it from here.

Watch Nell’s TEDx talk

And if you want to go deeper, Nell is also my guest on this week’s Is Anything Real?

We get into systematic subtraction, over-efforting, pro-zilience, caregiving, fake urgency, success, and why trying harder isn’t always the answer. A fitting conversation for a Monday when I’m intentionally giving you a little less.

👉 🎙️ Success Isn’t Additive: Subtraction, Pro-Zilience, and High Performance | Ep. 82 with Nell Derick Debevoise