Eleven Things That Don't Matter

The discipline of choosing

A surgeon doesn’t walk into the operating room juggling six patients at once. One table. One body. One incision. Everything else waits.

Yet somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves the opposite was true. That capable leaders do more things simultaneously, not fewer. That’s not focus. That’s a slow leak disguised as productivity.

A few months ago, a VP at a Fortune 500 sat with me, visibly wired. Eleven “top priorities” on a whiteboard behind her. Running on few hours of sleep. She opened with, “I just need better time management.”

I asked one question: “Which three of those eleven would still matter if you got fired tomorrow, and someone new walked in?”

She went quiet. Then she circled three. The other eight? Two were someone else’s problem. Four were leftovers from a strategy that had already shifted. Two were things she was doing because nobody told her to stop.

Within six weeks of protecting those three, her team started hitting deadlines they’d been missing for two quarters. She stopped working weekends. The eight things she dropped? Nobody noticed. Not one person asked where they went.

That’s the part that wrecks people. Not the letting go.

WHAT COMPETING PRIORITIES ACTUALLY COST YOU

The word priority was singular until the 1900s. It meant the first thing. The one thing that comes before everything else. We pluralized it, and in doing so, we broke the concept entirely.

When everything matters equally, nothing gets your best thinking. You skim. You react. You move fast in circles and call it momentum. The executives I work with almost always land on the same realization: they’re not overwhelmed because they have too much to do. They’re overwhelmed because they haven’t decided what not to do.

I wrote about this shift a while back in Change Your Focus, Change Your Life. The premise still holds: what you focus on isn't just a productivity question. It's an identity question.

THE DISCIPLINE OF ELIMINATION

Focus isn’t a feeling. It’s a series of small, uncomfortable decisions to let things drop. Not delegate. Not defer. Drop.

You may struggle here because your identity is tangled up in being the person who handles everything. Saying no to good work feels like a character flaw when your whole career was built on saying yes. But reliability without boundaries is just people-pleasing in a better suit.

Rick Rubin is a nine-time Grammy-winning producer who's worked with everyone from Johnny Cash to Jay-Z, and whose entire genius is knowing what to remove, not what to add. And he barely touches the mixing board. He doesn’t even know how to read music.

What he does is sit in a room, listen deeply, and tell you what to cut. His genius isn’t addition. It’s subtraction.

Focus works the same way. You don’t find it by adding better systems. You find it by getting honest about what’s moving the needle and having the nerve to abandon the rest.

THE COST OF KEEPING YOUR OPTIONS OPEN

We’re trained to believe optionality is power. Keep your doors open. Stay flexible. But when that becomes your default operating mode, it’s cowardice wearing the mask of strategy. Every option you keep alive costs you attention. Every “maybe later” is a tax on your present thinking.

The most focused people I know aren’t the ones with fewer obligations. They’re the ones who’ve gotten comfortable with the grief of closing doors. You have to let go of the version of you who does everything in order to become the version who does something extraordinary.

The world doesn’t reward the busiest person in the room. It rewards the one who chose correctly and went deep enough to make it count.

Stay human
-Bryan

P.S. What's the one thing you already know you should drop but haven't? Reply and tell me. I read every one.

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I’m Bryan, and if you’re an owner, leader, or executive, pull up a chair. Fancy stuff: Built companies in Silicon Valley. Gave a TEDTalk. Keynoted 200+ times. Crashed hard. Found my way back. Lost 85 lbs. Ditched diabetes. Moved to Lisbon. And as it turns out, you can operate differently at any age.

I work 1-to-1 with leaders at all levels. Start here - includes a chemistry session, no cost, no strings.

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