“It’s better to do one thing well than ten things poorly.” — Heather Hart
That quote takes away an enormous amount of pressure. And it runs entirely counter to the culture most of us absorbed during our working lives; the culture that rewards busyness, equates complexity with sophistication, and treats the ability to juggle multiple priorities simultaneously as the highest professional virtue.
The most compelling counterargument to that culture I have encountered came not from a business school or a management consultant, but from two friends in their late twenties who had everything the conventional success script promised and found it had made them miserable.
The packing party that started a movement #
Joshua Fields Millburn was the youngest director in his company’s 140-year history before he decided to step back. Ryan Nicodemus had a comfortable corporate career before being laid off around the same time. Both had good jobs, reasonable incomes, and the ability to accumulate as much stuff as they wanted.
Both were miserable.
When Joshua began simplifying his life, Ryan, a self-described “type A” sort of person, wanted the same results but faster. So, they did something they called a packing party. They boxed up everything Ryan owned as if he were moving house. Ryan then unpacked only what he needed, as he needed it. After three weeks, 80% of his boxes remained untouched.
Ryan had his answer. And Joshua, already a passionate writer, had his subject. In late 2010 they started a blog. That blog became The Minimalists.
What minimalism is about #
The New Yorker called them “sincere prophets of anti-consumerism.” They have been featured in Time, Architectural Digest, and GQ, and have spoken at Harvard, Apple, and Google. Wikipedia
But the movement they built is frequently misunderstood. Minimalism is not about having as little as possible. It is not a competition in deprivation. As they put it themselves: removing the excess is an important part of the recipe, but it is just one ingredient. If you are concerned solely with the stuff, you are missing the larger point.
Minimalists don’t focus on having less, less, less. Minimalists focus on making room for more: more time, more peace, more creativity, more experiences, more contribution, more contentment, more freedom. Clearing the clutter frees up the space.
Minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things, so we can make room for life’s important things — which aren’t things at all.
What a simple blog became #
After more than a decade, starting with nothing but one concept and the discipline to deliver on it consistently, the results have been remarkable:
700+ media interviews. 600+ blog posts. 360+ podcast episodes. 25+ team members. 10 national book tours. 4 bestselling books. 2 Netflix documentaries. 1 Emmy nomination. Hundreds of millions of downloads. Tens of millions of readers and viewers. Millions of social media followers. Thousands of writing students. Countless lives simplified. All the memories. Zero advertisements.
That final line is not incidental. Zero advertisements. The entire enterprise was built on the quality and consistency of a single idea, without the structural props of paid promotion. The idea was strong enough to carry the movement on its own terms.
The business principle underneath #
The Minimalists story resonates so strongly because it is not just a story about minimalist living. It is a story about what happens when you choose one thing, commit to it completely, and resist the persistent temptation to complicate it. Simplicity, consistently applied, outperforms complexity every time. There is power in the single-purpose tool precisely because there is no distraction from the purpose itself.
The Quaker merchants who built business empires across three centuries understood the same thing. They were not simple-minded: they were clear-minded. That clarity, in communication, in dealing, in relationships, became their competitive advantage. Modern business has largely forgotten this lesson, equating complexity with sophistication and jargon with expertise, when the opposite tends to be true.
For small and medium-sized businesses, where resources are finite, attention is precious, and the temptation to diversify is constant, the one-thing principle is not a counsel of timidity. It is a counsel of power. The business that does one thing exceptionally well, communicated clearly and delivered consistently, builds a reputation that no generalist can replicate. Clients know what they are getting. Referrals are specific and warm. The expertise compounds rather than spreading thin.
The harder discipline #
Sticking to our knitting sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires a kind of ongoing discipline that most businesses find genuinely difficult.
The opportunities that pull us away from our core are rarely obviously bad ones. They are usually adjacent, plausible, and occasionally flattering. A client asks whether we can extend our service into an area just outside our expertise. A new market appears that seems to map onto what we already do. A competitor starts offering something we don’t, and we wonder whether we should too.
The discipline is not in resisting obviously wrong choices. It is in resisting the quietly seductive ones that would dilute what we have spent years building into focus.
Millburn and Nicodemus could have turned The Minimalists into a lifestyle brand selling curated minimal-aesthetic products. They could have taken advertising revenue. They could have expanded into adjacent wellness territory. They did none of those things. They kept the idea clean and let the idea do the work.
That is what doing one thing well actually looks like over the long term.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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