Stop Adding, the Life You Want is Built by Removing

Written by Ben Robins, Life and Executive Coach

Ben Robins is a life and executive coach and keynote speaker who works with ambitious people ready to create extraordinary lives without sacrificing their ambition.

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For years, the advice was the same, do more. More habits, more goals, more hustle. I followed that playbook. It worked, and it nearly broke me. Here's what I discovered when I finally stopped adding and started removing instead.

I was leading the European business of a global consulting firm. Managing teams across multiple countries, advising major international brands, hitting every target that had been set. On paper, I was winning.

Off paper, I was exhausted, burnt out, and despite every external milestone, something fundamentally still felt off.

I'd been doing everything the personal development playbook prescribed. Early mornings, meditation, the gym, reading the right books. I was optimising everything, and yet I still felt like I was running on empty.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise the problem wasn't what I needed to add. It was what I needed to remove.

Michelangelo, when asked how he sculpted David, said he simply looked at the marble and removed everything that wasn't David. The masterpiece was always there. It just needed everything else cleared away.

Now I am certainly not saying I am a masterpiece, but the idea of chipping away at my life, rather than adding more, appealed to me. It changed my relationship to life, and it's the same removal-first approach that has transformed the lives of the people I now coach.

Why addition is the wrong starting point

You can absolutely build a life through addition, more discipline, more systems, more force. I did it for over a decade. It does work, but at what cost?

If you're trying to juggle a million different things, adding more to your already full plate likely isn't going to make things better. And all the morning routines in the world won't last if they're stacked on top of unconscious patterns, beliefs that no longer serve you, and an identity you didn't consciously choose. You end up building a taller house of cards, not a more fulfilling, meaningful, or joyful life.

Removing first is faster, more sustainable, and considerably more easeful. What follows are the four layers I worked through, and the things I removed at each one.

Layer 1: Clear the external noise

Before you can add anything meaningful, you need to stop letting chaos into your environment and mind.

The first thing I removed was mental clutter. Bizarre as it sounds, I used to pride myself on being able to keep everything going, just by holding it in my head without a to-do list.

Sure, I never dropped anything, but I hadn't considered the tax I was paying. My brain was holding far too much, and as a result, I felt constantly fragmented and overwhelmed. It wasn't so much because of my large workload, but because I had so many mental tabs open.

The solution was to get everything out of my head. Once it was out on paper, I could sort it. Will I ever use this? No? Then I don't need to think about it. Do I need to take action on this? Then it goes on a to-do list I can actually check off.

The mental clarity that followed was startling, and I see this with clients too. They think they need better time management. What they invariably need first is to start by closing those cognitive loops draining their energy.

The second piece of external noise I cut was the news. It's controversial, as people always ask, aren't you ill-informed, how do you stay up to date with things?

But I have always found that if something important happens, people will tell you. The news, by design, keeps your attention by making you feel the world is worse than it is.

Churchill's doctor banned him from listening to broadcasts during the war, noting they were spiking his anxiety without informing his strategy. I found the same thing. Watching the news late at night left me lying awake replaying disaster scenarios that had nothing to do with my actual life. Removing it changed how I thought, slept, and acted, more than almost anything else I've done.

It's not really about the news, but letting external perspectives influence your life, so I have always since become ruthless at cutting out things like doomscrolling, social media, or constantly checking emails.

Layer 2: Remove the misaligned actions

Once the noise is cleared, the next question is, what are you actually doing with your time and energy?

For me, this meant getting very clear on my schedule, rather than it running me. I found that if I wasn't clear on my priorities, my calendar would decide them for me, or worse still, someone else's. I'd previously get pulled into meetings that didn't require me, conversations that didn't move anything forward, obligations that felt urgent but weren't aligned with what actually mattered.

I once suggested a client tell a meeting organiser, 'I'll join when it becomes relevant for me to contribute.' They were convinced they'd lose respect. Instead, they gained it. Your time signals your value, but only if you treat it that way first.

The second misaligned action I removed was having too many goals. I used to believe that ambition meant excelling at everything simultaneously, top performer at work, peak fitness, learning a language, reading 52 books a year, the list would go on. I was making progress on everything and real progress on nothing.

Before the 2008 Olympics, Michael Phelps had one goal, eight gold medals. His coach Bob Bowman made him quit everything else, no sponsorship deals, no parties, no distractions. Phelps later said the hardest part wasn't the training. It was saying no to everything that wasn't the pool. But he won all eight golds.

Even the greatest Olympian of our time didn't pursue competing goals. When I cut to one clear priority, I finally had the focus to make real progress.

Layer 3: Stop chasing the wrong things

This layer goes deeper. It's about what you're actually chasing, and whether you're chasing it for yourself or for someone else.

For years I was caught in comparison. Measuring my career against others, defining success by money, prestige, and how it looked from the outside.

It took a moment in Portugal, sitting with my partner by a lake, with a little space from the rush of our day-to-day lives, to finally say out loud what I'd been avoiding. The life looked right, but it wasn't truly mine.

What I tell my clients now, it's okay to be weird. In fact, the more your life looks different to everyone else's, the more likely it is that it's actually yours.

A question I ask myself now before adding another achievement to chase is, do I want this, or do I think I ‘should’ want it?

Layer 4: Examine the stories running beneath everything

This is the deepest layer, and the one that makes the most difference. The stories we tell ourselves become the life we live. Not 'I made a mistake,' but 'I am a failure.' Not 'I'm learning,' but 'I'm just not that type of person.'

These start as thoughts, but repeated long enough, they become identity. Identities we defend without ever questioning whether they're true or not.

As Carl Jung put it: 'Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will run your life, and you will call it fate.'

For me, the story was rooted in believing life 'should' have been different, that I had time to make up for, ground to recover. It showed up as relentless overthinking, replaying conversations, overanalysing decisions. Nothing ever felt quite significant enough.

Maya Angelou had a similar problem. She felt every sentence had to be perfect, every word was analysed to the point of paralysis. Eventually she started writing her recurring worries on a 3x5 index card. She filled fifty cards in the first week. When she spread them on the floor, she realised she'd been having the same twelve thoughts for thirty years. She kept the cards in a box, never looked at them again, and removing those stories allowed her to write seven autobiographies.

You can add all the habits and systems you want. But if you're operating from an old, unexamined belief, you will keep sabotaging yourself without ever understanding why.

To better understand the stories holding you back, here are some questions to reflect on. When you next feel hesitation, when you don't go for the thing you say you want, pause. Write down what you're telling yourself in that moment. Then ask, is this actually true today? Or is it a story formed at some earlier point and never re-evaluated?

Most of the time, you'll find it belonged to a younger version of you. You've just been carrying it forward like a permanent label.

The question worth sitting with

The personal development industry will keep telling you to add more. More routines, more optimisation, more systems. And some of that is genuinely useful, but only once you have the capability to handle more.

Stack habits on top of mental clutter, misaligned commitments, borrowed goals, and unexamined stories, and you're not building a better life. You're just building a taller version of the same one.

So before you add anything else this week, ask yourself one question, what is the single thing you could remove that would create the most space, in your mind, your schedule, or your sense of who you are?

Start there. The rest will follow.

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Read more from Ben Robins

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Ben Robins, Life and Executive Coach

Ben Robins is a life and executive coach and keynote speaker who spent over a decade in leadership, including running EMEA for a global consultancy with clients such as Google and Meta. He knows firsthand what he now sees consistently in his clients: the limitation isn't capability or discipline, but what people believed they needed to succeed.

His approach starts by removing rather than adding. Once what's blocking them is cleared, clients can see what's actually possible and start building intentionally across everything that matters, not just their careers. Ben works with clients across London, Dubai, Singapore, and the US.