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Jeff Bezos refused to add a second category to Amazon for years. The average $1M business owner runs a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, and three offers at once.
Guess which one is actually growing.
Think Big Minute #34
You can do anything you want. You cannot do everything you want. Most business owners learn that the hard way, after the calendar is already full of things that aren't working.
Adding a new thing always feels like progress. A podcast feels productive. Short form video feels like growth. Another offer feels like another door. So you say yes, and yes, and yes, and six months later you're running nine things and none of them are good.
That's not momentum. It's dilution.
Sam Ovens has a video from 2018 called Death by a Thousand Cuts. His point is that nothing big kills your productivity. It's the small things. Each one looks like it only costs a minute, so you let it in, and the sum of all of them quietly bleeds you dry. The same logic applies to projects. No single project sinks you. Nine of them splitting your attention does.
Here's the math nobody runs on it. Your attention is fixed. The podcast gets 11% of it, the newsletter gets 11%, the video gets 11%, and nothing gets enough to actually win. Then you sit there wondering why everything feels stuck.
Look at the people who refused to do this.
Bezos kept Amazon on books for years. He had the capital and the demand to sell everything from day one and chose not to. Sinegal built Costco on roughly 4,000 products while Walmart carried over 100,000. In-N-Out has run the same four-item core menu since 1948, turning down decades of chances to add more.
Then there's Jobs. He came back to Apple in 1997 and killed most of the product line, cutting it down to four products. That cut is what saved the company.
Ovens is the cleaner example for our world. He grew Consulting.com to around $18M a year without an Instagram account, without Snapchat, barely touching Facebook. He didn't start producing content until January 2018, and only then because he'd hired and trained enough people to cover it without stealing time from customers. He didn't add the content until adding it wouldn't cost him the main thing.
None of these were small operations run by people short on ambition. They were the most ambitious companies of their era. They just understood that ambition and addition aren't the same thing.
Doing more is the most common way to feel busy while going nowhere.
I cut several things this week.
I'd been running a podcast. Short form video was in production. A handful of other projects were all live at the same time, and honestly I was all over the place. Every one of them was getting a slice of me instead of the whole thing, which meant none of them were getting my best work. There wasn't enough of me to go around and I'd been pretending there was.
So I cut them. The podcast is gone for now. Short form video is paused. A few other things came off the board completely.
Not because they were bad ideas. Because I was doing nine things at 40% when I should have been doing three at 100%.
What's left is the Think Big Minute posts, YouTube long form, and the actual businesses. That's the whole list now. It already feels better, and the work is sharper because it's the only work getting my attention.
Here's why business owners are bad at this specifically.
Saying yes to a new project feels like ambition. Saying no feels like quitting. So the instinct is always to add, never to subtract. What nobody tells you is that attention is a fixed budget. You can print more revenue. You cannot print more focus. When you add the seventh project you are not adding capacity, you are quietly stealing it from the other six.
It's subtraction wearing the costume of addition.
The business owner running nine things tells himself he's building an empire. He's building nine things that will never be good enough to matter to anyone.
Here's how to actually cut.
Write down everything you're working on. Every project, channel, offer, side initiative. Most business owners are genuinely surprised by how long the list is once it's on paper.
Rank each one by what it's actually producing. Not potential. Not "this could be huge someday." What is producing revenue or real traction right now, this month.
Pick your top 3. Three is roughly what a business owner can run at full effort. Past that, something is always getting your leftovers.
Cut or pause everything else. Not slow down. Cut. A paused project getting zero attention is healthier than a live one getting 10% and dragging.
Say it out loud to your team and your audience. "I'm pausing the podcast to focus" beats letting it quietly rot. People respect a clear decision.
Watch the top 3 get better. When three survivors split the attention nine used to, they improve fast, and that improvement is your proof the cut was right.
Hold the line for 90 days. The hard part isn't the cut. It's the shiny new project that shows up next Tuesday. Your three are written down. Everything else waits.
Add back only what you can afford. Ovens didn't start content until his team could carry it. When one of your three is winning and running on systems, you've earned the fourth. Not before.
Stop adding things. Start cutting them.
Three things done at full strength will beat twelve done at half strength every single time.
Think Big
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