This is advice given by experienced writers to get rid of an unnecessary storyline, character, or sentence in a piece of creative writing. It’s simple to understand but very difficult to implement. Because you work hard on that creative writing piece. You research, strategize, coin new quotes and then it’s expected that you remove those for the sake of overall story.
I guess, this is not only applicable to writing but it’s equally applicable to business world.
When new year starts, every organization go through strategy meetings, multiple rounds of discussions, huddle meetings, and various presentations, excel charts (nowadays Power BI dashboards), doing SWOT analysis, defining new KRAs/ KPIs and so on.
But we all know, how much actually we could implement throughout the year !! And why that fails is simply because, many times strategies are designed by someone at the top with lots of assumptions and overreliance on execution team. In today’s uncertain world, things keep changing and we go back to our own world, that we are familiar with. Year after year.
𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗕𝗶𝗮𝘀 also explains the same phenomenon. We filter out any new information that contradicts our existing theories, beliefs and understandings. Warren Buffet said, “𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘶𝘮𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘤𝘵.” We keep searching for support or proof to substantiate our beliefs.
Preparing strategy is good but execution of strategy is difficult. We spend enormous time in strategizing but lack skill of executing it to perfection. We don’t want to challenge ourselves to do different or out of the box things, to avoid failures and look bad in our management eyes. In fact, there is no KRA defined for experimenting failures.
It’s important then to murder all other wish list items, irrespective of how much we love them, and focus on most important, very few goals for perfect execution. 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒅𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒐𝒚 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒍𝒊𝒌𝒆 𝒕𝒐 𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆.
