When you first learned to walk, your brain sent big sweeping nerve impulses out towards your legs. Along the way, every nearby nerve and their many muscles were triggered unnecessarily.
As a result, lots of unnecessary movement occurred and your legs stabbed out clumsily in many directions. You fell down. Your parents laughed. How cute.
By age 1, you were walking. But science shows you had gained absolutely no new neuromotor pathways. So how did you learn to move in a new way without new mind-body connections?
The answer: you learned what not to do.
Your CNS learned which neuromotor pathways you need NOT to fire your nerve impulses down. By pruning these out from your patterns of movement, you stopped triggering all the wobbling that was surplus to the step you wanted to take. You removed the unnecessary.
Improving a system by subtracting something is known as the Via Negativa approach. You can read more about it in our article entitled 'Improving HubSpot By Subtraction; Not Addition'.
Likewise, in all business operations, from sales and marketing to rev-ops and communications, your best performance is achieved by removing the unnecessary. It’s not the click-bait solution that attracts a lot of attention, but it works.
Nobody can profit from you cutting the unnecessary. They can only profit from you with additive solutions. That's why everyone is trying to sell you more software, sign you up for more training seminars, subscribe you to more memberships. But we're here to tell you that you needn't add all of those things to get more efficient. You can achieve efficiency without adding anything. Just subtract.
You can start today by making a list of things to cut. We advise you try cutting them one by one, watching out for any knock-on effects. Give each change some time to settle before moving to the next one, and reintroduce anything if it's removal causes problems. Once you've reached the end of your list, you'll know with certainty which actions you didn't really need to be doing.
You might soon feel like you've just learned to walk again for the first time - no stumbling or extraneous effort. Just efficient stride after stride towards your goals. That's what we hope for you, because Everyone's Happier When Tools Work Better.
Struggling to list all the things you might cut? For a comprehensive checklist of all the areas where you might improve by subtraction, download theVia Negativa Checklist below.
Once your workflows are pruned, you’ll need a much smaller impulse of energy sent down from the top to achieve the performance you’re seeking. Managing your teams might soon become as easy as a walk in the park.
Obsessive about optimization, vBase Digital understands how to unlock the potential in any system. If you want to work smarter and not harder with HubSpot, contact us.
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We hope this article helps you to unlock the potential of the systems around you. Because we believe humanity is happier when our tools work better.
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