Hey Reader,

Recently I spent a few days with my friend Alex Goldfayn, watching him walk YPO members and their teams through a sales and revenue workshop.

The whole workshop turned on one simple shift: when you look at everything in sales through the lens of serving others, you move from self-interest to value creation.

As I reviewed my notes, Alex's words about the power of simplicity kept running through my head. He's spent more than two decades building, refining, and simplifying his system so organizations can put it to work. That's an important reminder for anyone who carries the weight of leading other people.

Simple moves you to action

Why is simple so powerful? Because it clarifies. Because it's actionable. Because it removes the barriers of complexity that sit between you and doing.

When you make complicated things simple, you stop wondering what to do next. You move out of a reactive state and into action, and if you do that long enough, action stops being something you do and becomes who you are.

Steve Jobs put it this way in a 1998 interview with BusinessWeek: "Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains."

Complexity looks smart. It isn't.

Every leader feels a natural pull toward complexity. So does everyone else. A 2021 study in Nature, led by Gabrielle Adams at the University of Virginia, found that when people set out to improve something, they look for what to add long before they look for what to take away. When an incoming university president asked for ideas to improve the school, only 11 percent of 651 suggestions involved taking anything away.

In leaders, that pull usually shows up for one of two reasons.

The first is that you're a trained problem solver. You hold all the context and all the meaning, so you try to capture every layer of nuance in the most complete model you can build. Complex might capture the nuance, but it doesn't clarify, and it won't crystallize into action.

The second reason is quieter: complexity can cover for doubt. Make it complex and you'll look smart, or at least that's the story you tell yourself. That story is a fallacy, because simple isn't the opposite of smart.

The most elegant work runs the other way. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the pilot who wrote The Little Prince, put it this way in 1939: "perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."

Here's the root of it: complexity can masquerade as worth, and as leaders, we have to stamp that out. Hard things are real, and I'm not suggesting you ignore them. I'm suggesting you understand them well enough to radically simplify them. As Alex puts it, "simplify to the void, and keep simplifying until you can't simplify any more."

The question I ask myself

I'm guilty of this too, so here's the question I use on myself and with the leaders I work with: What's the most radically simple way to state this, through the lens of my objective, and what can I do to bring it to reality?

When you line everything up behind an objective, what seemed complicated gets clear, and so does the next step. It might not be perfect. It doesn't have to be. A clear next step is a catalyst for action.

Leadership is simple. It's just not easy.

Simple is worth more than ever

This matters more today because AI can overcomplicate anything. How many times have you asked what you thought was a simple question and gotten back a 20-page response, or an Excel model you had to spend an hour decoding?

The tool will always hand you more. Choosing less is your job.

You can make that choice on purpose. I tell my AI tools to ask me questions first, in plain English and one at a time, before they build anything, and to answer in clear, simple language every time. The questions make you get clear on what you want. The plain language keeps what comes back usable.

Simplifying to the void doesn't dumb down your value, your wisdom, or your intent. It creates clarity, so you can build alignment, and so you and your team can go execute.

The world is noisier than ever, with more options, more choices, and more distractions. In that world, radical simplicity isn't just a power move. It might be the very thing that sets you apart.

Try this before Friday: pick the priority that feels most tangled right now. Write it in one sentence that names the objective and the next step toward it. If it takes more than one sentence, keep cutting.

dusty

P.S. If you haven't heard my conversation with Alex, start with Episode 61 of Leadership Unlocked. He does a wonderful job of turning the most important and most challenging work in many organizations, creating revenue, into a simple framework that's actionable and meaningful. Selling shifts from something you do to people to something you do for people. Once you see it work, you can't unsee it, and that's what makes great results possible.