The Discipline to Discard

Sign post encountered on a hike in New Zealand

Jim Collins is a business writer whose target audience is usually not visual artists. But wisdom has leaky margins and the best crosses the categories. In a recent essay Collins writes:

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit— to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort—that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

Another business author, Matthew May, has his own anecdote of this wisdom:

I was working closely with the senior leadership of a very large and successful Japanese company. I had been hired to help it develop new ideas and strategies in the United States, but was struggling with a particularly difficult project that required me to reconcile two completely different perspectives. (Eastern and Western ways of thinking are often at odds with each other.) I found myself at a standstill.

I must not have done a very good job of hiding how useless I was feeling, because a 2,500-year-old snippet of Chinese philosophy found its way to me anonymously, via a handwritten note on a Post-it stuck to my work space.

“To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day,” it said, capsulizing teachings of Lao Tzu. “Profit comes from what is there, usefulness from what is not there.”

My first thought was, “Someone wants me gone — I’d be more useful that way.” But as I read it again and thought about it, lightning struck.

It dawned on me that I’d been looking at my problem in the wrong way. As is natural and intuitive, I had been looking at what to do, rather than what not to do. But as soon as I shifted my perspective, I was able to complete the project successfully.

Even though the idea of subtracting things every day was thousands of years old, it was still radical to me.

To complete this trifecta of business wisdom that is also useful for creatives, here is Amber Johnson‘s report on how Mike McAvoy, president of the satirical news source, The Onion, views this issue:

It’s this business process of “whittling down” ideas that is most transferable to other companies, McAvoy told the audience. He offered a simple two-step process: “First, get a lot of good ideas. Then reduce, reduce, reduce so your final ideas are really great.”

Pablo Picasso famously said, “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary”. As so many pithy statements go, stating it simply does not make it easy.