Welcome to Subtract to Succeed. If you’re exhausted by doing everything “right” and ready to try the opposite, you’re in the right place.
I’m Nell, and I help ambitious, big-hearted leaders escape the addition trap and build their subtraction muscle. Because doing less, more intentionally, is the only path to a life that feels as good as it looks.
Nicholas Whitaker was on a plane to Baja a few years back, headed to a meditation teacher training, reading Camus’s The Rebel to locate the quote he’d loved for years: in an unjust world, the best thing we can do is to be so free that our very existence is an act of rebellion. He read the whole book and never found the line, which turns out to be more of an amalgamation of Camus’s ideas, not an actual sentence he wrote.
But Nick got what he was really looking for. Having just been laid off, he was trying to reconstitute an identity that wasn’t centered on a paycheck or a title, and the search left him with a real question: what is it that I’m up to? How do I actually help people?
The answer to that question became the Rebellion Collective, and Nick — its self-titled Chief Rebellion Officer — was a Subtraction Session guest for Optimism Month.
A few things from our conversation I want to make sure you catch, even if you don’t watch our full conversation (above):
Meet the void. Nick’s diagnosis for what’s actually draining you. VOID is an acronym:
Volatility
Overwhelm
Isolation
Distraction and Disconnection
NB: this VOID you may be feeling is not a personal failing. There’s a lot of us in there, we just can’t always see each other. (I think that’s a result of the features of a void.)
His guidance isn’t to struggle your way out of the void: it’s nearly impossible to get your footing that way. Like “shaking fists at clouds,” as Nick says. He helps clients look directly at it and recognize the situation for what it is, rather than numbing to sit comfortably in it, pretending it’s not terribly unpleasant, or falling into victim mentality and overlooking the agency you have to get out.
The CHEAT code isn’t cheating. His specific antidote is another acronym (he apologized for how many he’s made):
Capacity
Habits
Energy
Attention
Time
Five levers we all do have. (I dug deeper into the Capacity piece specifically in Monday’s Optimism Month Scenario, because it’s the fundamental unit of subtraction).
Your corporate job doesn’t deserve your rebellion. Nick’s take: capitalism, corporate life, “the system” — these aren’t the enemy, they’re just context. The real rebellion isn’t flipping the table and walking out. It’s staying inside the system, and getting back to your own terms, if slowly, to get somewhere you actually want to be. Rage-posting and black-square activism, in his words, is useless, with no real impact — or lasting satisfaction.
The shame under the gratitude. We went here first, before optimism even came up. I share Nick’s belief in the power of a simple gratitude practice, but was curious if he also sees the guilt that seems to show up right alongside gratitude for my Subtraction clients. The gist is, “I don’t want to announce this privilege when things are so bad for everyone else.”
His answer: silencing your own good fortune doesn’t lift anyone else up. If dark is real, share that too — just not as a trauma dump. Both truths, held at once, is what Viktor Frankl called tragic optimism, and it’s the only way to have what Nick calls a near life experience instead of a numbed one.
The eighty percent experiment. One of his overachiever clients kept hitting the same wall: prove more, earn love, earn belonging, burn out, repeat. The question Nick asked: what if you just gave less of a damn? Show up at 80%, which is still more than most people’s 150%, and watch what that feels like? Terrifying at first. Then they ran the whole workload through a priority matrix, delegated or dropped everything that didn’t make the cut, and within about a hundred days, they had the focus to read books again. Stand in the garden without separation anxiety from their phone. State clearly, for the first time in a while, what they actually wanted.
When I asked Nick the top priority subtraction for someone who’s deep in the void today, he answered: drop the shame first. Not the to-do list, not the pressure — the shame. Replace it with one of his five C’s: compassion, curiosity, courage, connection, or commitment. Add any one of them, he says, and the day gets better.
Find Nick and the Rebellion Collective at rebellioncollective.com — their next community gathering is August 5th. Or at nicholaswhitaker.com for his speaking and executive work. He’s newer here on Substack (Nicholas Whitaker), so go say hello there too.
Your question to sit with today:
If you dropped some shame today, what would you actually let yourself feel grateful for?
See you tomorrow for your daily track from the Subtraction Summer School soundtrack! Keep on rollin’,
Nell
