Pack light, travel far

"Mate…. Pack light, travel far." 

My friend Liam says this with a sort of semi-patience as he notices the way I’ve been packing his Skoda wagon for the past hour. Let’s call it bemusement. We're in his garage on the outskirts of Auckland, preparing to guide a handful of American business owners on an 8-day cycling tour around New Zealand. 

Even at my sharpest, spatial reasoning simply ain't my strength. And on this particular day, this cognitive shortcoming was operating at an even greater disadvantage, thanks to a dreadful case of jet lag, a frustrating business divorce, a recent major geographic move, and and the unsettling prospect of having to figure out what came next.

Complications? Complexity? Chaos? Clutter? Cognitive load? Yep, I had them all. 

The way I'd stuffed our support vehicle with supplies for every conceivable need of the adventure ahead was … unsustainable, at best. And there was still plenty more that needed packing. 

It's not like I was new to leading this kind of tour. It's just that I was trying to tackle something that doesn’t come naturally to me with impaired decision-making, while not clearly understanding Liam’s vision for the week ahead. 

His “pack light” was an invitation dressed as mandate to pause and exhale, take stock of the situation, and make some rigorous decisions about what we really needed for the experience we were trying to create. The point was to subtract, to remove all of the complications, complexity, clutter, and cognitive load I was adding to the trip ahead.

That moment in Liam's garage sticks with me—not in a profound way, but because it was so obvious. I was overloaded, under-rested, and my solution was to keep cramming in more. 

Recognize the pattern? 

Those of us who are building something of our own that we care about can relate to the trunk full of clutter in Liam’s Skoda. We find ourselves sacrificing bandwidth and equanimity for complexity and complications. We share a simple underlying desire: to run a business that makes money, doesn’t bury us alive, and feels like ours. One we can sustain for the long haul. 

I’ve written this for you if you’re building something that matters, and you have that goal too… to help you pack light, and travel far in your own way.

Just this one time 

I have this amazing client—who’s since become a friend—a talented business owner who builds experiences, events, and products that help ADHD entrepreneurs. One day, she sheepishly started a conversation with, “ya know, I’ve been saying this for months: I really should stay out of Canva.” 

Rather than having the team she’d put in place do what they were designed to, my friend kept returning to the same energy-consuming task of fiddling in Canva–when her big brain was better spent on her business’ bigger decisions. She continually insisted that she liked being creative. Or that it didn’t take that much energy. Or that it was simply faster if she just made the changes herself. 

In the moment, each justification sounded reasonable. The problem is that “I’ll just do it this one time” has a way of turning into a full-blown habit that then becomes a fire-breathing business operation–with halitosis. 

And why wouldn’t it? We basically start businesses by ourselves. Simultaneously working as the visionary CEO, customer service manager, floor sweeper, and shipping department. Wearing all the hats and doing all of the things is a matter of survival when trudging our way to the initial goal of a secure revenue stream. Our carry-it-all muscles get lots of training in those days. 

Even when the revenue comes, we keep defaulting to those same muscles. And as our businesses evolve, our bias toward more remains: to do more, have more, be more, carry more. More products, more options, more clients, more tools, more systems. This creates a more intricate machine with multiple gears that each compete for the same finite pool of energy and attention.

That complexity sound familiar? Yeah, I’ve been there too. 

When we finally name the cost out loud, it ranges from "I'm out of balance" to "I want to fire myself from my own business—or burn the whole thing down." 

Between those two extremes, here are other refrains I hear that signal the load is starting to exceed their capacity:

● I don't know what I'm supposed to prioritize anymore 

● I'm not sure what my goals are supposed to be 

● Everything works, but it all feels heavier 

● I don't even know if this is a business problem or a life problem anymore 

● I can't make another decision this week 

● I probably should stop doing ______ 

● I feel so overwhelmed 

● Nobody can do it the way I do 

Have I missed any other personal faves? Let me know. And if you’re assuming this is all building toward “do less,” think again. 

It’s complicated 

For most of us, adding more is the brain’s instinctive response to a challenge.

In a 2021 article in Nature, behavioral science researchers showed that “people systematically overlook subtractive changes.” Across those experiments, 80% of participants chose addition as their solution. That percentage changed only when people were told that subtraction was an option. The research also showed that the more overwhelmed and cognitively loaded we are, the more likely it is we’ll default to additive solutions. Stress doesn’t just make us feel overloaded; it makes us more likely to add to the load.

When we don’t know what to do, when we don’t trust where we’re going, when we don’t believe it’s working, we reflexively add. 

Raise your hand if, feeling a cashflow fear, you reactively decided the answer was to add a new product or service offering. Or, wanting to provide better value for your clients, you added a layer of service that required a level of your own energy you did not foresee. Or, you chose to work on an exciting new idea instead of securing the boring foundational risks in your business. 

I’ve certainly been there and done that, only to overwhelm myself and lose valuable business in the process.

The coach-consultant industry itself runs on addition. More frameworks. More courses. More revenue growth goals. More tools. More optimizations. For many of us, growth and more are synonymous. We get rewarded for doing, having, being more. That’s what gets seen. Subtraction goes unseen. 

I’ve seen it also in the high-performing amateur cyclists I used to coach. Fearing they hadn’t trained hard enough, they’d sneak in more training than they needed, at a higher intensity than they could handle, only to show up on race day overtrained and sick. 

Their training data said they were on track, but the myth inside their head argued otherwise.  

How we think about growth actually might be the first thing worth subtracting. 

But let’s face it. Subtraction is hard. There’s no shortage of mental biases keeping us from it: loss aversion, the sunk cost fallacy, the endowment effect, and a bias for the status quo, for starters. 

These don’t work independently. They reinforce each other by keeping ineffectual practices in place. Complexity protecting complexity. And over time, the complexity we preserve becomes the very thing that constrains us.

My favorite business strategist Adriana Tica has observed that after we surpass initial revenue concerns, our constraints shift. At first, the constraint is attention: “I just don’t have enough time. I need better systems.” Then, complexity itself takes over: “Things are working, but everything feels heavier.” Although both can feel true, neither is the core problem. 

Complexity is the nature of business ownership. Interconnected parts, moving pieces, challenging decisions. That doesn’t ever go away. 

What makes it feel burdensome are our own buried complications–patterns below the surface that make everything more difficult than it needs to be. It’s these patterns from which most operational complications spring. 

What started as one workaround becomes a process. One process becomes five. Before long, we’re maintaining processes we didn’t consciously choose and may have long since lost track of. 

Hidden complications impact our capacity to think clearly, move decisively, operate sustainably. No system built on top can solve the underlying problem. It can only delay dealing with it.

If you remember one thing only, please let it be this: Hidden complications compound complexity. Complexity produces confusion. Confusion produces cognitive load. Cognitive load makes you sad. 

Myths and complications 

I began my career as an oral historian on a Hollywood studio backlot, working with Holocaust survivors and their stories. I tend to spot stories everywhere. Some are just stories. Others have hardened into the myths — that’s where the buried complications live. 

Myths like: 

Ambitions we need to have 

Who we are supposed to be 

How we need to be seen 

The playbook we’re supposed to use 

What we're supposed to achieve 

How quickly things need to happen 

What we imagine we control 

Myths create costly mischief and misdirection, and I speak from lived experience. They’re built from the hidden cognitive biases, assumptions, blind spots, and motives we all carry.

For business owners, there's often no gap between the personal and the professional. Pressure on one side adds weight and drag to the other. 

The business divorce I alluded to earlier: that was actually my second. It's embarrassing to admit, though hardly an unusual story. 

But finding myself there again sent me looking for help, and I ended up finding a mentor. As we started unpacking it, I watched myself fall into old patterns. I told him about my ex-partners. About what I thought was wrong. Who was to blame, and why, and how, and on and on and on. 

He let me finish, then he was quiet for a long moment. He asked me what I kept believing that put me in the same position twice. 

I didn't have an answer that day, and it was a while before I would. But eventually I found two things I'd been operating on without ever choosing them. The first was needing to be seen as successful in a certain way. A need for status that only I had. The second was a belief that I needed to partner with other people to have the authority to do what I wanted and the ability to make it happen. 

How those came to be isn't important. That they made me rush into decisions with partial clarity is. They had become ingrained into my identity, and then operationalized into my actions. 

Hidden complications don't announce themselves as problems. They show up as beliefs, as habits, as goals that sound completely reasonable within their own internal logic. It’s only when the friction of our complications starts costing us something that we become open to other interpretations. 

This shows up frequently with the business owners I help. They come in carrying confusion, chaos, and clutter–all getting in the way of where they’re trying to go. To understand the nature of those obstacles, I start with understanding the conversations these people are having with themselves. 

One business owner came to me with strong revenue that happened sooner than expected, and no clear sense of why it still felt so hard. What she created was impressive and looked enviable from the outside. But she’d built a business others had told her to build. It never felt true to who she was, or where she wanted to be — and that confusion was making her “success” feel heavy and overwhelming. In our time working together, my favorite question she asked was, “I can build my business to fit my lifestyle? Really? I can set the goals that are important to me?” Because of her past career experience, her industry norms, and the people advising her at this stage of her business, this was a complete revelation. 

But once she subtracted that, we organized her business around the life she wanted to lead and who she wanted to be in its place. From there, she created her own playbook, the one that built a business that is quieter, more sustainable — one that fits her needs. 

So many business owners tell me about how they always felt different from others. That they’ve had to take a different approach to life than people around them. They wonder if everyone else got a playbook they somehow missed. It might work to start out following someone else’s playbook, but trying to maintain it ultimately creates complications. 

Directionally correct 

A rule of thumb for accomplishing anything is to decide on your destination then work backwards. No duh, right? 

But the truth is many of us start businesses unplanned and unprepared–out of necessity. Plenty Most of us do start with some idea of where we’re going. It might be vague, but it’s there — a sense of what we’re building and why it matters. The problem isn’t that we lack direction entirely. It’s that the vagueness was good enough to get started, but not clear enough to guide what comes next. And as the business grows, we keep adding — more systems, more commitments, more complexity — while the landscape underneath keeps shifting. New understanding emerges. Conditions change. The direction that made sense in year one may not fit who we’ve become by year three.

Problem is, unless you know where you’re going, you can’t know what to pack–or subtract.  

If you set out to walk from one end of your country to the other, you’d start with a pretty certain idea of where you wanted to finish. You’d then decide the important milestones along the way and the energy you’d need to reach them. You’d also carefully consider what you could leave behind without compromising the journey, knowing the heavier you pack, the harder the journey. 

Without direction, we keep following the same map, packing the same things, and arriving at the same places. Getting somewhere new may mean leaving behind what got you here. That’s called being directionally correct–a phrase I’ve nicked from my friend Michael Marckx’s “The Belief You Keep Having” Ted Talk. 

When my wife and I got together, we had a basic shared understanding: what we were building together was the most important, no matter what. No kids, no religion. And we’d re-confirm this with each other every few years. That’s not a strategic plan. It’s a destination we both recognized. And it’s worked—for nearly 30 years. 

Your business deserves the same kind of honesty. 

Here are a few questions I come back to whenever I need to get clear on mine, and the same set I bring to work with my clients: 

What is the thing or life I’m actually trying to create? 

Why am I trying to create that? 

Who do I actually need to become to achieve it? 

How will I know when I’m off course? 

“Strategy is just a story about who we’re becoming.” That phrase has stayed with me ever since I first heard it. It simplifies strategy for me. It means having a reasonably clear idea of not only where we’re going, but also why we’re going there. Once we’ve done that, we can work backward to determine what will help us become what we envision and what might hold us back. 

Visualizing that destination is not easy — especially when our hidden complications have been choosing for us. If you say you want to build the biggest firm in your field but really want a business that gives you flexibility and comfort, you're packing for the wrong trip. You’re overstuffing the Skoda. 

Intention matters. Motive matters. Ownership matters. 

Remember to exhale 

For years, I’ve carried a wooden coin in my pocket. It’s got a cartoon image of Buddha on it with the phrase “You need to let that shit go.” On both sides. 

A friend gave it to me during a challenging transition–when my complications were getting pretty thick. The coin reminds me when it’s time to subtract. And even when I don’t like the message, I’m forced to turn it over and get the same answer. I now give the same coin out to people I meet who seem to be waiting for permission to put something down. 

From all my years of doing this work–on myself and then alongside the business owners I get to help — one thing has become a non-negotiable for me: we have to subtract the hidden complications, or we’ll keep building on top of them. And that creates a fragile foundation. 

That’s what subtraction is. It is less about what we do than what we’re carrying. And that starts with an exhale, creating space to navigate the systems we’re already in. Making room to choose boldly for ourselves, rather than letting our complications choose for us. The practice is asking what your complications are costing you. That means asking: every time I say yes to this, what vision of the person I could become am I saying no to? Because the overwhelm, the overfunctioning, the swimming against the current in your own business doesn’t resolve itself. It keeps compounding. And you’ll never get lighter by trying to carry more. 

Building a business is an act of creativity, regardless of how mundane its services might seem. I told you I started my career as an oral historian, but for many more years after that, I went on to work as a producer for companies like Disney. The job of the producer is to bring a creative vision to life—the film, the experience, the game, even the album.

A producer maintains the vision while harnessing the resources needed to create something out of nothing. The job becomes about knowing the destination, listening and observing clearly, asking better questions, and keeping the endeavor directionally correct. 

That’s the deep, creative work I do with the people I help. Together, we look for their complexities, complications, confusion, chaos, and clutter. We find the underlying myths. From there, we ask critical questions, we discard what’s not working, and we get moving. 

When clients start answering those questions honestly, the subtractions start looking surprisingly pragmatic. One stopped trying to manage everything herself and hired an executive assistant to keep her organized. One intentionally locked herself out of Canva. One cut her podcast schedule in half, because there was no evidence that more had been better–it was only exhausting her. One passed a project to her operations manager and realized the business could generate more revenue without her hands on every part of it. Some of these came easily and quickly. Others took more work, because there was more at stake. Like letting go of a piece of who they were–the fixer, the producer, the one who holds it all together. But in almost every case, they ultimately realize they’ve been trying to control the uncontrollable. And that it’s time to let that shit go.

That’s the practice. Not some grand Marie Kondo-inspired purge during a simplification weekend. Taking one complication at a time, examining it honestly, and setting it down on purpose… until finally, we’re no longer swimming against the current in our own business. 

It doesn’t have to be complicated. 

If the goal is to build a business that fits, that we can run sustainably, then subtraction is how we pack light, travel far. 

Remember to exhale, 

Bryan Yates 

My entire career has been about studying human behavior—starting as an oral historian working with Holocaust survivors. The fields have changed over 27 years, but the job has always been the same: observe the patterns people can't see from inside them, subtract what's not working, and help them get moving in the direction they actually want to go. 

If you’re curious what it would be like to work on your business together…