The April issue of Personal Strategy Compass is out, and this one took longer to find its frame than most.
The image that finally unlocked it was Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love tour. Not the Born in the USA stadium spectacle that preceded it. The moment after, when he stripped the stage down to almost nothing and played to smaller rooms with a tighter band. Less machinery. More exposure. A different kind of intensity.
That image kept returning because it names something specific: the difference between a stage that is full and a stage that is right. Most planning conversations never make that distinction. They assume more is better, or that clearing means retreat. The Tunnel of Love tour suggests otherwise. Springsteen did not clear the stage because he had less to say. He cleared it because the season required a different configuration.
February’s issue was about disappearance. March introduced the delete key and the Dead or Difficult rule. Those were clearing operations. April asks the harder question: once you can see the stage, what actually belongs on it?
The issue introduces two frames for that question. The first is the Personal Quarterly Offsite as a listening environment rather than a planning session. The distinction matters. A planning session produces a list. A listening environment can change what you are willing to carry forward.
The second is the barbell strategy, borrowed from investing. The logic is simple: put weight on the extremes, defend the core on one end, fund the bounded bet on the other, and let the respectable residue of earlier seasons go. Addition by subtraction is not a sentiment. It is an operating principle, and the barbell is what it looks like in practice.
The issue closes with a question worth carrying into any Q2 offsite: what are you still carrying because you need it, and what are you carrying because you are used to seeing it on the stage?
Those are not the same question. Most planning systems never separate them.
Read the April issue here: https://open.substack.com/pub/dennis538/p/personal-strategy-compass-april-2026
[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]
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