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“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
E. F. Schumacher, 1973
Sears was the biggest retailer in the world. Then it got stuck in the middle of the market. Walmart owned the low end on price. Nordstrom owned the high end. Sears, squeezed between them, died in the gap.
Basketball has the same middle. The mid-range jumper is the least efficient shot in the game. For a decade, NBA teams deleted the shot on purpose. They kept the layup and the three, cut everything between, then scored more efficiently than the game had ever seen.
Money works the same way. Nassim Taleb calls it the barbell. Put most of your savings somewhere safe. Put a sliver on the wildest bet you can stomach. Skip the middle.
- The safe pile survives a crash.
- The wild sliver catches the upside.
- The middle takes the fall.
The middle looks safe, so most money sits there and a crash hits it hardest.
My jogging habit runs on the same shape. A floor and a bar. Three minutes is the floor, short enough to survive my worst day. Eight is the bar, high enough to stretch my best.
A single target would try to do both and do neither. So I put the habit on a range instead of one number.
For a while five minutes sat in the middle of the range, the number I was meant to aim at. Five minutes survived no bad day and stretched no good one. I cut it.
Dieter Rams built a career on this: less, but better.
The middle number felt like discipline. It was only dangerous decoration.
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What could you cut from a system you run to make it better?
