[Greatest Hits] What If We Subtracted: the Illusion of Control

Some ideas are worth a second look. This August, while I'm in the final stretch of TEDxSanDiego prep (live Aug 27!), I'm pulling favorite Subtraction Scenarios back to the top of your inbox — the ones that seemed to be most useful the first time around.

New here? A Subtraction Scenario starts with "What if we subtracted: X?" — one belief or habit at a time, the exercise that builds our Subtraction muscle. They address a theme each month (we’ve covered love, money, power, and more — stay tuned in the fall for Learning, Indigenous Wisdom, and Ritual), and are enriched by conversations with experts on each of those topics — Subtraction Sessions, released on Wednesdays and also being replayed here this month.

This space is for thinking clearly about work, meaning, and energy within systems and moments that rarely make room for pause, reflection, or sensemaking, even though those are often prerequisites for real success.

We don’t rush to solutions, ignore context, or offer one-size-fits-all routines. Instead, we practice seeing what’s actually happening, so we can step out of default thinking and experiment with letting go of what drains us. At least the parts that are within our control to release, which is often more than we expect.

Today’s piece is very much in that spirit, as are the practices below, which offer a variety of ways to apply subtraction to your own life, whether you’ve got 60 seconds, 15 minutes, or no more energy than what it takes to copy and paste an AI prompt.

It’s January 5, and many of us are just now walking back into work, perhaps refreshed after a pretty slow (in some ways 🙄) two weeks; eager to start, advance, or dream up a new project or skill; or at least have officemates to share the mixed blessing of the last dregs of Christmas cookies and other holiday sugar ‘gifts’.

Or maybe, equally tired as we were on December 21. And more discouraged by that, having had the ‘gift’ of rest.

Because we’re also carrying a news cycle that continues to shock and awe.
An inbox that mushroomed, immune to our out-of-office autoresponder.
New initiatives piled on top of old ones that were never finished or forgiven.
Customers who are angrier, budgets that are tighter, and leaders who are louder — or quieter in that way that feels even worse.

And here’s the honest part: most people cannot subtract very much of that.

You can’t delete the economy.
You can’t unsubscribe from geopolitical drama.
You can’t always fire the boss, restore the client’s budget, or redesign the org chart because they’re draining you.

So if subtraction is going to help right now, it has to start somewhere else.

What if we subtracted the illusion of control?

And I do not mean shirking responsibility. Or giving up your agency. Or shrinking that huge heart of yours and caring less.

This is an invitation to let go of the illusion: the exhausting belief that if you just try harder, watch more closely, anticipate every outcome, stay paranoid, and think one step ahead of reality (or your competitor), you might finally feel safe again.

That belief is understandable. It’s also draining our life force. Which is exactly what we need to do what we’re here to do. The will to keep helping, learning, growing, showing up with the courage to acknowledge that the current system is not working. And try something else.

The illusion of control has taught me more than one painful lesson.

As a coach and advisor, I love sharing ideas, frameworks, resources that genuinely changed how I see things. Sometimes people are grateful. Sometimes they barely register it. And even when they are grateful, they may never use the thing in the way I imagined or hoped they would.

For a long time, I confused caring with control. If I just explained it better, framed it more clearly, followed up at the right moment, surely the insight would land. And change their behavior to what I imagined it should be.

Eventually, I had to let go of the fantasy that I could manage someone else’s learning arc.

I didn’t stop sharing. I let go of my unhelpful thought spirals about what I could do to ‘get them to see’ the power of my teaching.

And the energy that came back from that one subtraction was… welcome!

But I would never have recognized the (thin, and often gray) boundary between offering help and attaching to its outcome if I didn’t STOP and look honestly at what I was doing, what I was thinking, and its impact on me — and the people I was hoping to help.

In the Stop-Drop-Roll method, STOP is not a productivity trick, or an elusive break to get away from it all, but a practice of observation, data collection, and analysis.

We must stop long enough to actually look at what’s happening. What’s real, what’s rumor, what’s signal, what’s froth.

Stop long enough to notice what your body is doing, because your physical experience is valuable information, whether your job description acknowledges it or not.

Stop long enough to separate what is urgent from what is important, which are not moral labels, but important filters to allocate your finite energy.

And what I found in that pause, and have watched lots of other people find, is the quiet but consequential truth: not everything we’re carrying is actually a must.
Some of it just feels safer to hold on to.

Some of it comes from outdated habits.
Some of it is inherited anxiety.
Some of it belongs to an old identity — how we learned to survive, be valuable, stay ahead — which by the way is not working in this moment, so... is it really that bad of an idea to experiment with dropping it?

And of course, some of the things we’d like to drop really are must-do’s. And can’t be dropped, for now.

There are deadlines that are firm. People who depend on you. Real constraints. Real consequences.

Subtracting the illusion of control doesn’t dissolve those. It does something even more powerful.

It frees up enough mental energy to ROLL.

To connect the dots. To make meaning. To own the story we are telling ourselves.

When our grip on control loosens, the question shifts from How do I keep my head above water? to Why am I choosing to stay in this, and what am I aiming my effort toward?

This is where sensemaking becomes survival.

Viktor Frankl wrote that humans can endure almost any “how” when they have a compelling “why.” Not because meaning erases pain, but because it alleviates the suffering caused by the inevitable challenges of life. Understanding what we’re working toward on the other side of a difficult situation contains the discomfort

When we lose sight of the bigger picture, the hard elements of our work become unbearable not because they’re hard, but because they feel purposeless.

Rolling is the act of restoring logic, direction, and coherence to what we are willing to overcome.

It’s telling yourself a story that is neither delusional nor defeatist, but true enough to live with.

I am doing this for now, not forever.
I am choosing this because it serves something I still care about.
I am allowed to plan an exit while I stay engaged.
I can hold both realism and agency at the same time.

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This is not about blaming individuals for broken systems or asking people to tolerate the intolerable indefinitely. It’s about refusing to add self-betrayal on top of difficulty.

Subtracting the illusion of control doesn’t make the world kinder. But it does makes you less fragmented inside it.

And that gives you strength to carry on, not rolling over to accept a problematic situation, but to stay present, which is the only chance you’ll have to make it better.

The relief that follows from this release of [illusory] control isn’t dramatic.
It’s the feeling of putting something down that wasn’t heavy when you picked it up, but after holding it for longer than expected, it is enough weight to make your steps shorten and your arms throb. And realizing you don’t need to pick it back up because it’s not even supposed to come along to the place you’re going.

This is what subtraction actually looks like in practice.
Not doing less because you care less.
Doing less because you can see more clearly what matters.

This part of the newsletter is where the work actually moves from insight to impact.

Starting this year, these weekly Subtraction Practices live behind the paywall — not because reflection should be exclusive, but because it works differently when there’s real investment on both sides.

For readers, paying changes the posture.
It’s no longer something to skim and save “for later.”
It becomes a choice: I’m going to take this seriously enough to practice.

For me, it creates the space to take this work seriously too — to keep refining the frameworks, designing practices that respect real constraints, and supporting this body of work as a living practice, not just a publishing output.

That mutual investment matters.

Just as importantly, the practices themselves have evolved.

In 2026, I’m designing these tools with radical honesty about time and energy — because the illusion that we should all have an uninterrupted hour for deep reflection is part of the problem we’re trying to solve.

So instead of one long “ideal” exercise, each week you’ll see multiple entry points, all aimed at the same insight, but designed for different levels of bandwidth.

Choose the one that fits the reality of your week — not the version of yourself you wish you were operating as.

There’s no gold star for doing more here.
The value comes from doing something deliberately.

Here’s how to engage this week, whether you’ve got 60 seconds in the shower for a thought exercise, 15-20 minutes to explore your illusions of control, or a colleague to engage. Or, whether all you can imagine doing is copying and pasting an AI prompt and seeing what might come back.