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This is the first in a short series on moving your service business up-market through marketing strategy. If the Ever Given container ship fiasco taught us anything, it’s that getting stuck is a lot easier than getting unstuck.

“In advertising”—and I would add, in all of marketing—“there is also a first principle.” “To attract someone’s attention.”

The fact is, the more we say, the less our audience will hear. Every time we feel like we should add another offer, another product, another message, or another focus to our marketing, we should try to pause.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong had a decision to make. The Lunar Module’s onboard computer was guiding the craft toward a crater’s edge, and a field of boulders “the size of Volkswagens,” according to biographer James R. Hansen.

Abraham Lincoln told the story of an “automaton chess player,” a complex machine that, all the way back in the early 1800s, could beat human players at the game.

Seneca once wrote, in On the Shortness of Life, “certain tasks are not so much great as prolific in producing many other tasks.” The essay’s general point is that we have plenty of time in our days—in our lives—but we spend too much of it doing things that simply don’t need to be done.

An old friend of John D. Rockefeller once recalled that—despite being one of the wealthiest people to ever live—Rockefeller would insist that they switch to old golf balls when playing around water hazards.