Let’s start with a test.
Open your phone—count them. How many apps have gone unopened for over two weeks? How many WeChat groups are set to “Do Not Disturb” and subsequently ignored forever? Does your monthly to-do list perpetually feature a dozen “important tasks” that have been pushed back for three months?
Now look at your life.
You’ve enrolled your child in piano, calligraphy, Go, programming, and swimming. Shuttling between different classes every week feels like rushing between gigs; both you and your child are exhausted. Ask yourself: which one of these is their true passion? Or is it that, you just stuffed them with everything out of a “what if they miss out” anxiety?
Companies are no different. Project lists grow ever longer, yet none truly stand out. Every single one eats into the budget; every single one is “okay,” but not a single one makes you slam the table and declare, “This is our killer weapon.”
Addition is a human instinct. Subtraction—is the truly scarce capability.
And regarding how to subtract, one man taught the entire world the most ruthless lesson.
In 1997, Apple was exactly 90 days away from bankruptcy.
This wasn’t an exaggeration; it was a cold, hard countdown on their financial statements.
The Apple of that era was an entirely different species from its current “minimalist aesthetic” image. It was a bloated giant, trying to do everything: over a dozen product lines—Performa, Quadra, Power Mac… there were so many models that even Apple’s own salespeople couldn’t memorize them. They even made printers, servers, and PDAs.
Every product line had a team working overtime, and everyone felt what they were doing was “quite important.”
The result? Trying to do everything meant being nothing. Apple was like a bucket riddled with a hundred holes, bleeding cash profusely.
This was the exact moment Steve Jobs returned.
Everyone held their breath, expecting the founder to pull out some earth-shattering new product to turn the tide.
But he didn’t bring a new product. He brought a blade.
During a product strategy meeting that had all executives on pins and needles, Jobs had enough of the endless presentations. He walked to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and drew one horizontal line and one vertical line.
A 2×2 matrix so simple it was almost laughable.
Across the top: Desktop, Portable. Down the left: Consumer, Professional.
Four quadrants. Crystal clear.
Pointing to these four quadrants, he said, “Apple will only make these four products from now on.” He paused a beat. “Cut the rest. All of it.”
The conference room fell dead silent.
That single stroke slashed 70% of Apple’s hardware business. Printers? Cut. Servers? Shut down. The Newton PDA—Apple’s pioneering device? Killed.
Engineers felt wronged: “But our product is actually quite good!” The board panicked: “If we cut off so many revenue streams, what happens to our cash flow?”
Jobs was ruthless. He saw the core pathology that everyone else missed: Apple’s disease wasn’t a “lack of product innovation”—it was that it had lost its center.
In Kendo, this disease has a precise name: the collapse of the Seichusen (Centerline).
The centerline is an imaginary axis running from the top of the head down to the feet. It is where power is most concentrated and defense is most impenetrable. The entire essence of Kendo is to guard your own centerline while breaking your opponent’s.
If you hold a shield in your left hand, a spear in your right, and carry a bow and arrows on your back—you look omnipotent. But if I deliver a single strike down your middle, you will die. By trying to accommodate too many things, your posture has skewed.
Once your posture skews, your centerline breaks. Once the centerline breaks, everything becomes a vulnerability.
The Apple of that era had exposed its centerline merely to accommodate that 70% of mediocre products. R&D resources were scattered, marketing resources were scattered, and most lethally—consumers no longer knew what Apple stood for.
Are you a computer company? A printer company? Or a PDA company? When you are everything, you are nothing.
Jobs’s cut wasn’t about saving money. It was about reclaiming the centerline.
Only by hacking away the weeds can nutrients flow into the remaining 30%. Four quadrants, four products. That is enough. Just that.
In May 1998, the iMac was released. That translucent, candy-colored computer dropped like a bomb into the stagnant PC market. In six weeks, it sold 800,000 units. Apple turned a profit that year—the gap between being 90 days from death and being reborn through a blockbuster product was nothing more than that single centerline.
The subsequent iPod, iPhone, iPad… all these miracles stemmed from that initial, brutal “return to the origin.”
Even now, in every keiko (practice), the most time is spent on the basic shomen suburi (front strikes)—striking down that invisible centerline, cut after cut. No shortcuts, no fancy moves, just relentless repetition.
Look at your phone. Look at your project list. Look at your child’s schedule.
How many “work-in-progress” items are there that, deep down, you know are just draining your energy without actually contributing value? How many “can’t bear to drop” opportunities are merely diluting your most precious attention?
Every extraneous branch is sucking nutrients from the main trunk.
Do you want a pile of “good enough” mediocrity? Or do you want a great product, a great life, that can pierce through the world with a single strike?
This cut must be made, sooner or later. The only difference is—do you make the cut yourself, or do you let the market do it for you.
