The House That "More" Built

There’s a house in San Jose where staircases lead into ceilings.

If you live out West or simply if you spend any time in the weirder corners of the internet, you may have heard of the Winchester Mystery House. As the story goes, Sarah Winchester – the heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune – once visited a medium who told her she was cursed by the spirits of everyone killed by a Winchester rifle. The only way to survive was to move west and continuously build a house without ever stopping. The bizarre features, including staircases leading to ceilings, doors opening into blank walls, winding hallways, were supposedly all designed as a labyrinth to confuse the ghosts trying to find her.

The result of this is a house that, over the course of many years, had literally hundreds of rooms built onto it with all sorts of crazy twists and turns. 160 of those rooms survive (there used to be more; the 1906 bay area earthquake did a number on it) and you can still visit this “mystery mansion” today if you are in the San Jose area.

But this is not about ghosts. Your business is not haunted.

The reality is that Sarah Winchester was a very kind, caring and quick-witted individual, not a grief-stricken lunatic that sells a lot of mansion tours and two-bit paranormal podcasts. The construction workers who spent, in some cases, 30+ years working on the Winchester House have tried and tried to get this message across. It doesn’t sell, of course, but they are the most believable source.

So…if she wasn’t building a crazy labyrinth to confuse the ghosts of people killed by the guns that made her fortune, why does such a crazy house exist?

One word: More.

It is true that she was heiress to a massive fortune: $500M in today’s money plus a monthly allowance beside. She had functionally unlimited capital (must be nice, right?) but no master planner. Nobody to say “what if we, y’know, subtracted a few things before we built more on?” Nobody to question the overall design.

It’s one of those things that can so often happen: every individual decision makes sense. A shortcut hallway there to solve having to walk through four rooms, a staircase here to fix a misaligned flooring, pushing out a little alcove to better enjoy a nice view of the bay. Yeah sure, we could use an extra bathroom here, saves our guests a few steps when they are stumbling around in the middle of the night looking for a glass of water.

All of these individual decisions made sense as one-offs. It’s only when you put them all together that you can look at the whole picture and realize just how messy things have gotten.

A ghost story. That is the easy place to file what you just read: a grieving widow, a hired medium, a mansion built by guilt and superstition. File it there and you miss the point entirely.

Strip away the séances and the rifle fortune and what is left is a person who, every day for thirty-eight years, was handed the same choice: add, or don’t. Every single time, she chose to add. Every time. That is not a haunting. It is a bias.

And it is not Sarah Winchester’s. It is ours.

We live inside a culture that sells exactly one direction. Walk the floor of any industry conference and count the sessions: scaling, expanding, launching, entering new markets, bolting on, unlocking the next tier. Nobody books the ballroom to teach you what to kill. The trade press runs the funding round and the product launch; it does not run the quiet Tuesday a company retired a product line and got healthier. Your board wants to hear about the new markets, not the abandoned ones. The podcast wants the growth story. Your own org chart has only ever grown a box. No one has ever called a meeting to celebrate the box they erased.

Addition feels like progress. That is trap, as simply put as possible. Launching something feels like building a company. Cutting something feels like admitting something didn’t work. One gets a launch party; the other gets a closed-door conversation nobody enjoys. So the rational, ambitious, well-advised CEO, the one who is reading those same books, working those same conferences, getting that same board feedback…adds. More channels. More products. More features, headcount, tools, dashboards, decks. Each one defensible, in its own way. Each one applauded. And one day you look up and realize you have built a company with a staircase that runs straight into the ceiling.

There is no conference for subtraction. There is no keynote called “The Twelve Things We Killed This Year.” Which is exactly why almost nobody does it! …And, exactly why the few who do pull away from the field.

The whole world is saying one word to you. From every stage, every feed, every quarterly review:

More.

My upcoming is about learning a different one. Subscribe to hear…”more” about that.