Subtract to Succeed™: Do More Good, Without Doing More
You’ve built a life of achievement — the kind other people admire.
Your team counts on you. Your clients trust you. Your family relies on you.
You carry it all because that’s what good people do… right?
But no one sees the exhaustion deep in your bones, the guilt of dropping the ball, or the quiet ache of wondering, in the rare moments you pause:
If I’m so successful, why doesn’t it feel good?
What if everything you’ve been taught about success is backwards?
What if the answer isn’t doing more — but systematically doing less?
Not another productivity hack. Something deeper: the courage to subtract.
In this honest, high-energy keynote, Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey (Nell3D) shares the life-altering breaking points that led to her Subtract to Succeed™ method — from burnout and missed milestones to a near-fatal head-on collision that made the cost of over-responsibility impossible to ignore.
You’ll learn the simple, universal 3-step tool leaders use to reclaim energy, clarity, and integrity:
STOP — Get quiet enough to gather real data about your effort and impact
DROP — Release outdated habits, inherited shoulds, and unhelpful structures
ROLL — Find the structural “win-win-wins” where your effort advances more than one dimension of your life or leadership
Subtract to Succeed™ helps leaders see their lives and organizations as living systems, not endless to-do lists.
It restores the clarity to choose, the permission to release, and the capacity to create change that’s actually sustainable.
You’ll laugh. You’ll exhale. You might tear up.
And you’ll walk away with a clear-eyed sense of what’s worth your energy — and the freedom to release everything else.
What would you do with 20% reclaimed capacity… not by working harder, but by letting go of what no longer matters?
Powered by the Lead in 3D framework
Subtract to Succeed™ sits on a deeper systems-based operating model: aligning ME (wellbeing), WE (team performance), and WORLD (meaningful impact). When leaders subtract what drains them across all three dimensions, they don’t just prevent burnout — they create exponential, interdependent impact with far less effort.
