The greatest chess player who ever lived, once revealed something that changed how I think about expertise. "The difference between a grandmaster and a master," he said, "isn’t that the grandmaster sees more moves. It’s that the grandmaster needs to see fewer moves."
Think about that. In a game with more possible positions than atoms in the observable universe, the path to mastery isn’t about processing more—it’s about needing less.
A beginner looks at a chess board and sees chaos. Thirty-two pieces. Sixty-four squares. Millions of possible moves. They try to calculate everything, analyze every option, consider every possibility. Their mind drowns in complexity.
A grandmaster looks at the same board and sees simplicity. Not because the position is simple, but because decades of pattern recognition have taught them to instantly eliminate 95% of possible moves. They don’t need to calculate what they already know won’t work. They see less to see more.
This is the paradox of mastery: as expertise grows, conscious processing shrinks. The master doesn’t do more—they need less. And this principle extends far beyond chess.
The Neuroscience of Not Thinking
When shown a chess position for just five seconds, grandmasters could recreate it almost perfectly. Beginners could barely remember where half the pieces were.
But here’s the twist: when shown random piece positions that could never occur in a real game, grandmasters performed no better than beginners. Their advantage disappeared.
Why? Because grandmasters don’t see individual pieces. They see patterns. A configuration of pieces that might take a beginner sixty-four bits of information to remember takes a grandmaster just one—they’ve seen that pattern thousands of times before.
Brain scans reveal the neurological reality. When beginners analyze chess positions, their entire brain lights up like a Christmas tree—frontal cortex, parietal lobes, everywhere. They’re thinking hard. When grandmasters analyze the same positions, brain activity is minimal. A little flicker in the pattern recognition areas. That’s it.
The grandmaster’s brain has compressed years of experience into unconscious pattern recognition. They’ve subtracted conscious thought from the equation. They’ve achieved mastery through mental minimalism.
Priya’s Trading Revolution
Priya was bleeding money.
For three years, she’d been day trading with the dedication of an Olympic athlete. She woke at 4 AM to study pre-market movements. She monitored six screens showing dozens of indicators. She tracked hundreds of stocks across multiple sectors. She made 30-40 trades per day, sometimes more.
She was also down $200,000.
"I thought success meant doing more," Priya told me from her Singapore office—now much quieter than it used to be. "More screens, more indicators, more trades, more hours. I was exhausted, stressed, and consistently losing money."
The turning point came when Priya met Wei, a legendary trader who’d retired at forty with enough money to buy a small country. She expected to find a command center worthy of NASA. Instead, she found a man sitting in a simple office with one screen, checking the markets twice a day.
"You’re doing it backwards," Wei told her. "You’re trying to see everything. The money is in seeing almost nothing."
Wei’s trading philosophy was radically simple: He only traded three patterns. Not thirty. Three. He only watched five stocks. Not five hundred. Five. He only made trades when his exact criteria were met. Most days, that meant no trades at all.
Priya thought he was joking. How could you make money by doing less? But Wei’s track record was undeniable. Twenty years. Average annual return: 47%. Number of losing years: zero.
The Elimination Framework
What Wei taught Priya—and what Priya now teaches others—is the Elimination Framework for decision-making. It’s the opposite of what most people do, which is exactly why it works.
Traditional Decision-Making: 1. Identify all possible options 2. Analyze each option thoroughly 3. Compare all options against each other 4. Select the best option
The Elimination Framework: 1. Define your core criteria (maximum three) 2. Instantly eliminate everything that doesn’t meet all criteria 3. Among what remains, take the first acceptable option 4. Move on
The difference is profound. Traditional decision-making is addition—more analysis, more comparison, more time. The Elimination Framework is subtraction—less to consider, less to analyze, less mental energy wasted.
Priya rebuilt her entire trading approach using the Elimination Framework:
Old Approach: Track 200 stocks, use 15 indicators, make decisions based on complex analysis New Approach: Track 5 stocks, use 3 patterns, eliminate everything else
Old Approach: Trade whenever she saw opportunity (30-40 times per day) New Approach: Trade only when all three criteria aligned (2-3 times per week)
Old Approach: React to every market movement New Approach: Ignore everything except her specific setups
The results were immediate. In her first month using the Elimination Framework, Priya made money. Not much—just $3,000—but it was the first profitable month in three years. Within six months, she’d recovered half her losses. Within eighteen months, she was consistently profitable.
"The irony is that I’m making more money working two hours a day than I ever made working fourteen," Priya says. "Subtraction didn’t just improve my trading—it gave me my life back."
The Expert’s Paradox
Why do experts need less information to make better decisions? The answer lies in what researchers call "thin-slicing"—the ability to find patterns in events based on narrow windows of experience.
Dr. John Gottman can watch a couple interact for fifteen minutes and predict with 90% accuracy whether they’ll divorce. He doesn’t need their life history. He doesn’t need hours of observation. Fifteen minutes.
Expert firefighters can sense when a building is about to collapse without consciously knowing why. They don’t analyze—they just know. And they’re usually right.
Experienced doctors often diagnose patients within seconds of walking into the room, before running a single test. The tests confirm what they already knew.
This isn’t magic. It’s the result of what psychologist Gary Klein calls "recognition-primed decision making." Experts have seen thousands of patterns. Their brains have unconsciously catalogued which patterns lead to which outcomes. When they encounter a new situation, they don’t analyze—they recognize.
And recognition is subtraction. It’s the elimination of conscious analysis in favor of unconscious pattern matching. It’s knowing what to ignore.
The Information Obesity Epidemic
We live in an age of information obesity. The average knowledge worker consumes 174 newspapers worth of information per day. We check our phones 96 times daily. We’re bombarded with more data in a single day than our grandparents saw in a year.
And it’s making us stupid.
Studies show that beyond a surprisingly low threshold, more information leads to worse decisions. Give someone three pieces of relevant information, they make good choices. Give them thirty pieces, they make terrible choices. The signal gets lost in the noise.
This is what happened to Robert, a venture capitalist who prided himself on thorough due diligence. For every potential investment, Robert analyzed everything: - Financial models going back five years - Interviews with dozens of customers - Competitive analysis of every player in the space - Technical deep-dives into the product - Background checks on all founders - Market sizing reports from three different firms
His due diligence reports averaged 200 pages. His investment returns averaged negative 12%.
Meanwhile, his partner Lisa used what she called the "Three Question Method": 1. Do I understand how this makes money in one sentence? 2. Have the founders done something hard before? 3. Would I be excited to use this product myself?
That’s it. Three questions. Decisions in days, not months. Her returns? Average of 32% annually.
"Robert was drowning in data," Lisa explains. "He thought more information meant better decisions. But all that information just made it easier to rationalize bad investments and harder to trust his instincts on good ones."
The Art of Selective Blindness
The secret of expert decision-making isn’t seeing more—it’s developing selective blindness. It’s knowing what to ignore. It’s having the confidence to not look at everything.
Consider how different experts practice selective blindness:
Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day but ignores 99% of investment opportunities. He doesn’t analyze what doesn’t meet his simple criteria. He doesn’t even look.
Steve Jobs famously never looked at market research. "It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want," he said. He practiced selective blindness to customer feedback, trusting design instincts instead.
Serena Williams doesn’t watch videos of every opponent. She focuses on her own game, selectively blind to most tactical analysis that other players obsess over.
This isn’t arrogance. It’s efficiency. By ignoring most information, they can focus completely on what matters.
Building Your Elimination Engine
How do you develop the ability to see less and achieve more? How do you build your own elimination engine? Here’s the systematic approach:
Step 1: Define Your Core Criteria What are the 2-3 factors that actually predict success in your domain? Not the 20 things that might matter—the 2-3 that definitely matter. For Priya, it was price pattern, volume, and trend alignment. For Lisa, it was business model clarity, founder capability, and personal excitement.
Step 2: Track Your Decisions For one month, track every significant decision. Write down what information you used and what the outcome was. You’ll be shocked by how much irrelevant data you’re consuming.
Step 3: Identify Your Noise What information consistently fails to improve your decisions? What data do you gather out of habit rather than need? What analysis do you do to feel thorough rather than be effective?
Step 4: Create Elimination Rules Develop specific rules for what you won’t look at. Priya doesn’t look at stocks outside her five. Lisa doesn’t read pitch decks longer than ten pages. Create your own boundaries.
Step 5: Practice Confident Ignoring This is the hardest part. You must develop the confidence to not know things. To not analyze everything. To make decisions with "incomplete" information—understanding that complete information is an illusion anyway.
Omar’s Sales Revolution
Omar was the hardest working salesperson at his software company. He was also the worst performing.
He researched every prospect for hours. He created 50-slide presentations customized for each client. He followed up relentlessly, sometimes sending twenty emails to a single prospect. He worked evenings and weekends, making more calls than anyone.
His close rate was 3%.
Then Omar discovered what top performers actually do. They don’t work harder—they eliminate better. He studied Sarah, the company’s top seller. Her approach was shockingly simple:
- She only called prospects who met three specific criteria - She used the same 10-slide deck for everyone - She asked five diagnostic questions in the first call - If the answers didn’t align, she immediately disqualified the prospect - She never followed up more than twice
Sarah worked half the hours Omar did. Her close rate was 34%.
"I was trying to turn every lead into a sale," Omar reflects. "Sarah was trying to eliminate bad leads as fast as possible. She wasn’t better at selling—she was better at not selling to the wrong people."
Omar rebuilt his approach using Sarah’s elimination principles:
Old Way: Research every lead thoroughly → Create custom presentations → Follow up persistently New Way: Five-minute qualification → Standard presentation → Two follow-ups maximum
His first month, Omar’s close rate jumped to 15%. Within six months, it hit 28%. He was working less and earning more. The secret wasn’t addition—it was subtraction.
The Confidence to Ignore
The hardest part of the elimination framework isn’t learning what to ignore—it’s developing the confidence to ignore it. Every fiber of our being says more information is better. Our education system rewards thoroughness. Our culture celebrates hard work.
But mastery requires the opposite. It requires the confidence to: - Make decisions with less information than feels comfortable - Ignore data that others consider essential - Trust pattern recognition over analysis - Choose speed over thoroughness - Accept that you’ll miss some opportunities by not looking at everything
This confidence doesn’t come from arrogance. It comes from results. Every time you make a good decision by looking at less, your confidence grows. Every time elimination beats analysis, your trust in the process deepens.
The Master’s Mindset
True masters in every field share a common trait: they’ve subtracted their way to excellence. They don’t do more—they need less. They don’t see everything—they see what matters.
Watch a master chef cook. They don’t measure ingredients. They don’t follow recipes. They don’t taste constantly. They know. Through thousands of repetitions, they’ve eliminated the need for conscious measurement. They cook by pattern recognition, not analysis.
Watch a master musician perform. They don’t think about finger placement. They don’t analyze chord progressions. They don’t consciously count beats. The music flows through pattern recognition so deep it feels like instinct.
Watch a master teacher teach. They don’t need lesson plans. They don’t follow scripts. They read the room instantly, adjust automatically, teach through intuition built on thousands of interactions.
In each case, mastery means needing less conscious thought, less analysis, less information. The master has subtracted their way to flow.
Your Path to Less
Right now, you’re probably drowning in information. Too many metrics to track. Too many options to analyze. Too many decisions requiring too much thought. You’re playing chess like a beginner—trying to calculate every possible move.
What would change if you played like a grandmaster? What if you could eliminate 95% of the noise and focus on the 5% that matters? What if you could make better decisions with less information, less analysis, less mental energy?
Start here: 1. Identify one area where you’re over-analyzing 2. Define 2-3 criteria that really matter 3. Eliminate everything else for one week 4. Track your results
You’ll be shocked. The decisions won’t get worse—they’ll get better. The stress won’t increase—it’ll disappear. The results won’t suffer—they’ll improve.
Because the chess master’s vision isn’t about seeing more moves. It’s about needing fewer. It’s about trusting pattern recognition over analysis. It’s about the confidence to ignore.
In a world drowning in information, the ability to see less is a superpower. While others analyze themselves into paralysis, you can recognize patterns and act. While they drown in data, you can surf on simplicity. While they calculate every move, you can play by intuition.
The grandmaster needs to see fewer moves because they’ve learned what doesn’t matter. They’ve subtracted their way to mastery.
What will you stop looking at to start seeing clearly?