Raise the bar” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Last week, one of my CEOs came to me with a problem.
“Dave, I’ve been playing around with Claude Cowork, and it’s clear that AI is going to disrupt our business.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I said.
“Well, it’s complicated,” he replied.
When a founder says “it’s complicated”, it means they’re stuck.
They might be pursuing a plan that isn’t working, or dealing with conflicting goals, or sometimes, facing disruption.
Those words speak to the biggest challenge to making decisions and scaling a company: complexity.
Simple scales, complex fails.
So why is simplicity so hard?
The problem of complexity will only get worse in the age of AI.
As the cost of writing code goes down to zero, adding new features is as simple as a voice command.
The temptation is to add more and more.
And yet, build an amazing product that customers love, or scale a business, or even to pivot, simplicity is essential.
So I came up with a model to help you create simplicity.
Think of an area in your business where complexity is stopping you moving forward. Then apply this simple two-step framework.
Step 1: Make Your #1 Goal Bigger
When your system has only one goal, you can make it very simple.
Adding another goal will create trade-offs, conflicts and edge cases. That’s because when pushed to the limit, all goals are in conflict.
More goals equal more complexity.
In a complex system, you’ll always find a variety of competing goals.
But if you order those goals by impact, they’ll form a Pareto distribution with the majority of goals having very little impact.
To minimise complexity, you need to focus on your #1 goal—the goal with the biggest impact. This is your simplifying goal.
There are two ways to dial up your goal to achieve maximum simplicity:
A. Make the size bigger
Bigger goals create more simplicity than smaller ones. As the goal increases in scale, the number of ways to achieve it decreases.
There are a thousand ways to increase profits by 10%, but very few things can move profits by 10X. Brian Chesky calls it “adding a zero”, and all the top 1% founders I know use this technique.
B. Make the timeline shorter
Near deadlines beat distant ones. As the deadline approaches, it becomes easier to see what really matters.
Imagine I told you you had one year of life left. You’d move items from your “someday” list into your “now” list, and a lot of the “now” list would move to the “never” list.
That’s why all the great founders insist on deadlines most people call crazy, because it’s the best tool you have for forcing clarity and simplicity.
A goal that’s massive and urgent is a simplifying goal because it makes your other goals seem irrelevant.
Step 2: Clean Up Your Thinking
One of the masters of simplicity was Steve Jobs. Steve said,
“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
But what is clean thinking, and why does it create simplicity?
Whether your thinking is clean or dirty depends on what’s motivating it.
In dirty thinking, you:
- Start with the plan you want.
- Find a way to justify the plan.
- Add more to achieve the goal.
Adding requirements is exactly what creates complexity.
But clean thinkers do something different. They:
- Start with the goal they want.
- Challenge the plan from first principles.
- Subtract what won’t deliver.
Subtracting requirements is the essence of creating simplicity.
Notice that if your plan is enough to hit your goal, you don’t need to subtract anything. It’s only when you make your goal bigger and bring the deadline nearer that you are forced to subtract.
So why do we hold onto plans that won’t work, and make our business and life more complicated?
I call this the Hidden Goal Iceberg.
Dirty thinking starts with a justification of something you already want to do. And if you want to do something, it’s not hard to find a justification for it.
We often use words like its “synergistic”, “additive”, or my personal favourite: “it doesn’t hurt”.
However, this is just the surface level . . . underneath is a hidden goal that really drives the attachment to the plan.
A hidden goal might be to finish something you’ve started, or to implement an exciting new idea.
It might be the goal of having the best possible valuation, even when it’s not best for the company. Or the goal of not firing staff, even when they aren’t adding value.
Hidden goals create complexity just as easily as explicit goals, because all goals are ultimately in conflict.
Even something that sounds as innocent as serving customers can be in conflict with your scale goal, particularly if they are customers you shouldn’t be serving in the first place.
That’s why you have to hunt for hidden goals and identify how they might conflict with the main goal.
And beneath every hidden goal is a fear.
- The fear of disappointing customers, or a teammate, or your board.
- The fear of missing out on an opportunity.
- The fear of failing and giving up on a goal.
The only way to achieve clean thinking is to face your fear and remove some of your hidden goals.
Raise the Bar
Recently, I showed a room full of CEOs a picture of a high jump.
I asked them, “What does it mean to raise the bar?”
“Increasing quality standards,” one of them said, and everyone nodded.
But that is not what raising the bar means. Raising the bar doesn’t make someone who can jump 2 metres suddenly jump 2 metres 10.
The bar is a subtraction tool.
We raise the bar until people who can’t reach the bar are subtracted.
That’s the key to simplicity. In light of a massive goal, we need to raise the bar until everything that can’t meet it has been subtracted.
You need to overcome sunk cost fallacy, shiny object syndrome, and even your own comfort.
And it can require you to say goodbye to team mates, customers, and even potential investors that aren’t aligned with the goal.
So if you’re in a situation that’s “complicated”, it’s time to choose a simplifying goal and make it so big that it becomes very clear what you need to say ‘no’ to . . . which is everything that won’t get you there.
Then, you’ll find that it’s actually simple, but like Steve Jobs said, it’s hard.
And in a world of AI, when everything is possible, saying ‘no’ will be the difference between a complex business that doesn’t scale and a simple one that does.
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Originally published on April 22nd, 2026
