What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from The More of Less
A founder wakes before her alarm again, phone already lit with messages from three time zones, and rehearses the same line on her drive in: once this quarter ends, things will slow down. She has said some version of that for four years. The company keeps growing — more tools, more contractors, more subscriptions renewing quietly in the background — and she keeps waiting for the time and calm she promised herself to show up on their own. It never does, because she has never named what that time and energy are actually for. Owning less, in a business or a life, only works as a means toward something specific you've chosen; cut tools, meetings, and commitments without first knowing what you're clearing room for, and the cutting has no direction — you just end up with a smaller pile of the same clutter. Once the destination is named, the excess becomes obvious, and so does what to keep.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Naming what the company is actually for
Before deciding what to cut, name what the business is supposed to buy you — time with family, creative freedom, financial security, a specific kind of impact. Without that answer, every efficiency effort just makes room for more of the same busyness.
A founder spends a weekend building a slide deck justifying why the company needs to "do more with less," but never once names what the extra hours saved would actually be spent on, so the freed time simply fills with more meetings.
Write one sentence naming exactly what you want more time or money for this year, and pin it somewhere you'll see it before every planning session.
How tools, hires, and side bets compete with that goal
Every subscription, contractor, and side project draws on the same limited attention and cash that your stated goal needs. Left unexamined, they multiply quietly, each individually justified, together crowding out the focus the business was supposed to earn you.
A two-person startup ends up paying for six overlapping project-management tools because each team member adopted their favorite, and no one questions the total cost or the time spent reconciling data between them.
List every recurring tool, subscription, and standing commitment the company carries, and mark which ones directly serve the goal you named.
Cutting the easiest excess first
Start with the low-stakes clutter — unused software, redundant meetings, dormant side projects — before touching anything emotionally loaded like a product line or a founding hire. Early wins build the confidence and evidence needed for harder cuts later.
A founder tries to overhaul the entire org chart in one sitting, gets overwhelmed by how tangled the decisions are, and abandons the effort entirely instead of starting with the unused analytics dashboard nobody opens.
Cancel or archive one clearly unused tool or recurring meeting this week, and notice what, if anything, is actually missed.
Re-examining as the company changes
A company that stays lean once rarely stays lean for long. New hires bring new tools, new customers request new features, and last year's necessary process becomes this year's dead weight. Revisiting the list of commitments each quarter, rather than trusting one cleanup to hold, keeps the business aligned with what it's actually for as it grows and changes shape.
Naming a clear goal and cutting excess can pull against each other when a beloved feature or team ritual doesn't serve that goal but still feels meaningful to the culture. Resolve it by asking whether the attachment is to the thing itself or to what it once represented — often a smaller, cheaper version can honor the value without the ongoing cost, freeing budget and attention for whatever you named as the real point of building the company in the first place.
Name one thing, honestly
If you cut every tool, meeting, and commitment that didn't clearly serve your stated goal for the company this year, what would be left standing?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Cancel or archive one clearly unused tool or recurring meeting this week, and notice what, if anything, is actually missed.