What If We Did Fewer Things?
By Diego Alcalá There is a mental bias that almost no one realizes they have. When we face a problem, our minds usually look for a solution by adding something:
By Buying America Editorial · Mon Jul 27 2026 · Mindset
By Diego Alcalá
There is a mental bias that almost no one realizes they have. When we face a problem, our minds usually look for a solution by adding something: one more investment, one more project, another source of income, another course. We rarely consider that the better answer might be to remove something.
Researcher Leidy Klotz demonstrated through simple experiments that, when people confront an imperfect structure, most prefer to add pieces rather than take them away—even when subtraction is cheaper and more efficient. Addition feels like progress; subtraction feels like giving something up. In money and investing, I believe that preference for adding can become extremely expensive.
We live surrounded by incentives to do more: own more assets, pursue more diversification, consider more “opportunities,” and chase more passive-income promises delivered in three-minute videos. But doing more is not the same as making more progress. Sometimes it is exactly the opposite.
The Portfolio You Cannot Explain
Start with the obvious. If you open your portfolio and find instruments you could not explain to someone in thirty seconds—what they are, why you own them, and what makes their value rise or fall—you may not have a diversified portfolio. You may simply have a collection of things. A collection of things is not a strategy.
I have written before about why concentration can make sense when the outcome depends on your own work, and why diversification is prudent when capital is working without your direct involvement. But there is a question that comes before that debate: the limit should not be how many assets you can buy. It should be how many you can genuinely understand.
Understanding is expensive. It requires time, attention, and intellectual honesty. That is why many people would rather buy more than understand more. Buying can happen instantly; understanding develops slowly.
For a foreign investor, this discipline matters even more. A cross-border portfolio can introduce additional questions about currency, jurisdiction, ownership structure, taxes, liquidity, and professional advice. Complexity is sometimes necessary, but complexity should serve a clear purpose. It should never become a substitute for clarity.
Productivity Is Not a Full Calendar
The same error affects the way we work. We confuse being busy with being productive. We fill the calendar with meetings, tasks, and open initiatives, then finish the day feeling that we did a great deal even though nothing important moved forward.
> “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently something that should not have been done at all.”
Real business productivity is not about adding activity. It is about removing noise and deciding what will no longer be done. That is the uncomfortable part, because eliminating something means admitting that an activity in which we invested time may not have been worthwhile.
The ego resists that conclusion. Yet a business that does not know what to stop doing eventually executes many things halfway instead of doing a few things exceptionally well.
This is especially relevant when evaluating a U.S. business from abroad. It can be tempting to add markets, entities, service lines, advisers, financing options, or properties before the central operation has earned that complexity. More moving parts can create the appearance of sophistication while making oversight harder.
The Hidden Cost of Too Many Open Fronts
Every front you open—a new business, another investment, additional debt, a side project, or a social commitment—has a cost that is not purely financial. It consumes attention. Attention, not money, is our truly scarce resource.
Seneca wrote two thousand years ago, “He who is everywhere is nowhere.” A person chasing ten goals does not advance in ten directions. That person remains stuck while becoming exhausted.
I have observed the same pattern repeatedly: talented people who do not fail because they lack ideas, but because they have too many of them. They opened so many fronts that none received enough attention to prosper.
A Canadian or other foreign investor may be tempted to build a broad U.S. strategy all at once: a business acquisition, a real estate position, a new company, financing relationships, and perhaps an immigration plan. Each may deserve consideration, but they should not automatically become simultaneous commitments. A sound sequence is often more valuable than a large inventory of initiatives.
Fewer Bets, Better Executed
What is the alternative? Excellence as a wealth strategy. The objective is not to make hundreds of moves, but to select a few and execute them extraordinarily well.
> “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Saying yes to everything is equivalent to having no strategy at all.
The same principle applies to wealth. A person who deeply understands three investments and holds them with discipline can be in a stronger position over the long term than someone who jumps among twenty trends without mastering any of them. The advantage is not necessarily more information. It is greater clarity.
Greg McKeown describes essentialism as “the disciplined pursuit of less.” Disciplined is the key word. Removing things is not the same as being lazy. Subtracting well demands more judgment than adding another item to the plate.
This does not mean that every concentrated portfolio is prudent or that diversification is unnecessary. It means that diversification should be deliberate, understandable, and connected to an investor’s objectives, risk tolerance, liquidity needs, and ability to oversee the assets. “More” is not a risk-management plan by itself.
Real Growth Versus Accumulated Activity
Not everything that moves is growing. Some people confuse activity with progress because both are tiring. But accumulating activity—more meetings, more assets, more projects, and more debt to finance more things—can create the sensation of advancement while real wealth remains stagnant or even erodes.
Real growth is often quiet and boring. It is a well-understood investment allowed to compound over years. It is a business that does one thing exceptionally well and repeats it. It is the debt you did not take and the investment you avoided because you did not understand it.
Accumulated activity, by contrast, is loud and addictive. Every new front delivers a small dose of the illusion that you are doing something.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. I suspect that money works in a similar way. Financial maturity does not arrive on the day you manage to own everything. It arrives when you understand how little you truly need to own.
Doing less does not mean making less effort. It means concentrating effort where it matters and having the courage to release the rest.
So ask yourself: how many of the things you hold today—in your portfolio, your business, and your life—remain because you understand them? How many remain only because you were afraid to let them go?
This article is educational and does not constitute individualized legal, tax, immigration, financial, or investment advice. Decisions involving U.S. investments or business ownership should be evaluated according to your objectives, circumstances, risk tolerance, and professional guidance.
Source: Adapted from Diego Alcalá’s Spanish article, “¿Y si hacemos menos cosas?” on Comprando América.