Santa Clara, California. Summer of 1985.

Two men sit in an office at Intel headquarters.

One is Gordon Moore, 56, the chairman. The other is Andy Grove, 48, the president.

They're not talking much that day.

For almost a year, the company has been drifting. Japanese factories are selling memory chips below cost.

Intel is losing money on every one.

But memory chips aren't just a product at Intel. They're the main reason Intel exists. It's what the company was built on in 1968. It's who they are. The entire brand, so to speak.

Grove later wrote in his book: "Our mood was downbeat."

He looks out the window.

In the distance, the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park is turning.

Families, kids, cotton candy. Round and round.

Then he turns back to Moore and asks the million-dollar question:

"If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?"

Moore doesn't hesitate. Not even a second.

"He would get us out of memory chips."

Grove: "Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?"

That's what they did.
But there's more!

What it cost

Intel shut down the memory business. Factories closed. More than 7,000 people lost their jobs.

That was nearly a third of the company.

Grove didn't pretend it was clean. He said later that closing plants in towns where Intel was the only employer "left a hole."

And here's the part most business books skip:

They didn't add microprocessors on top of memory.

They removed memory chips first!

That freed the money, the engineers, the factory space and the attention.

Only then did the new thing have room to grow.

You probably know how it ended.

The dinner nobody wrote down

At some point that day, both men went home. Moore to Betty, his wife since 1950.

Grove to Eva.

Eva and Andy had both been refugees. Andy fled Hungary at 20. He left behind his country, his language, even his name. He was born András Gróf.

So this wasn't the first time those two had let go of something big and important. Nope!

But nobody wrote down what was said at those kitchen tables.

History kept the office conversation and threw the other one under the bus.

That bugs me.

Because I know what would have been asked at my table. Probably before I'd had finished the soup...

My wife Hermina is Hungarian by blood and Romanian by passport. She's an accountant. We're twenty years married, (this week!) and she has never once opened a conversation about a big decision with "But how do you feel about it?"

Her first question is always about money and the consequences. And it comes in four parts:

Run Intel through her four questions.

Who paid? 7,000 families.

How much? Their income.

For how long? For some, years.

How will it affect them? Whole towns will change. People might have to move for other jobs.

Two men decided in an afternoon.

The bill went to a lot of kitchen tables.

That's not a reason not to let go. Intel had to.

But it's the perfect reason to look at the whole bill before you decide with a lot at stake.

Now the part that surprised me

You'd think the hard part of letting go is the courage.

It isn't. The hard part comes earlier. Most of us never even think of it.

In 2021, four researchers at the University of Virginia (Adams, Converse, Hales and Klotz) published a study in Nature magazine. They gave people a small Lego structure.

A brick sat on a roof above a little figure, held up by one wobbly pillar.

The job was to make it stable. Adding bricks cost 10 cents each!

Easy, right?

The easiest fix was to take the one wobbly brick away. It was free and done in a second.

About 60 percent of people added bricks instead.

Read that again, please. 60%

Then the researchers looked at real life.

When a new leader asked for ideas to improve an organization, the additive ideas outnumbered the subtractive ones about 8 to 1.

And here's the detail worth sitting with.

When people were busy, juggling a second task in their head, they were even less likely to think of removing something.

Read that again if you're running a business, a family and a body that's changing all at once!

"The busier you are, the less your brain even sees the option of putting something down. So you add."

• Another role.
• Another commitment.
• Another "I'll just handle that too."

That isn't weakness. It's wiring.

Nature never had this problem

It's October here on our homestead. The trees around the house are dropping their leaves right now.

A tree doesn't hold on to leaves it can no longer feed. If it did, the winter would kill it.

Letting go isn't the tree failing. It's the tree surviving.

Your body does the same thing, every day, in billions of cells. They switch themselves off on schedule.

In 1972, the scientist John Kerr described this programmed cell death, and his work led to a Nobel Prize.

Without it, you wouldn't have separate fingers.

Without it, damaged cells would keep going and turn dangerous.

In my framework, that's P1-22, the Law of Programmed Letting Go.

Ending things is a function, not a failure.

The second one is P3-23, Remove Before You Add.

Ecosystems recover faster when a harm is taken away than when a help is added.

Gabe Brown, a rancher in North Dakota, brought his dead soil back by doing less. He stopped ploughing before he added anything at all.

Intel did both. They let go of what was once their identity, and they removed it before they added the new thing.

Most men over 50 do neither.

We keep every role we ever picked up, and then wonder why there's no room for anything new...

Got Fifteen minutes? Pen and paper?

1. List your roles. All of them. Boss. Fixer. Caregiver. The-Holding-All-Togheter. The one who always drives. Treasurer of the club. The guy who answers emails on Sunday. The daughter who handles everything for her parents. Count them.

2. Ask Grove's question. "If a new person took over my life tomorrow, which of these would he/she drop?"

Put a mark next to each one.

Answer as the new man/woman, not as yourself. You know your reasons. He/she doesn't care about them.

3. Take the top one to the kitchen table. Run my wife's four questions on it, or a friend's if you prefer:

• Who pays if I drop it?
• How much?
• For how long?
• Who around me feels it?

4. Remove it. Add nothing. For 30 days, don't fill the gap. Watch what comes into the space on its own.

Don't quit anything this week. Just make the list and count the marks.

If you found no role the new person would drop, read the Lego part again.

That's your wiring talking, not the truth.

If you can't tell which of your roles is draining you, and which still feeds you, there's a shortcut.

Behind this link is a free next step. Click it. It's 100% free. The result might not be what you expect...

Let's regenerate the world, starting with yours.

Daniel

P.S. Two refugees who had already lost everything once probably weren't scared of losing a memory chip business.

Maybe that's the real lesson. The man who has let go before knows he survives it. The person who never has thinks letting go is the end. Read next week how and why my framework can spot the gaps or the questions we rarely ask.