Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz (2021)
Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz (2021)
Introduction: The Other Kind of Change
Subtracting is an action. Less is an end state. Sometimes less results from subtraction; other times, less results from not doing anything. There is a world of difference between the two types of less, and it is only by subtraction that we can get to the much rarer and more rewarding type.
In other words, subtraction is the act of getting to less, but it is not the same as doing less. In fact, getting to less often means doing, or at least thinking, more (15-16).
It’s been five centuries since Da Vinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away; seven centuries since William of Ockham noted that it is “in vain to do with more what can be done with less,” and two and a half millennia since Lao Tzu advised: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day” (17).
Ralph Waldo Emerson poetically links our thoughts and our physical world in his essay “Nature”:
Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons … It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas would cause the most striking changes of external things.
William James, one of the founders of psychology, observed essentially the same thing in the other direction, describing in The Principles of Psychology how our homes and other material things become part of our personality (17).
Part I: Seeing More
2. The Biology of More: Our Adding Instincts
In 1959, Harvard University psychologist Robert W. White took a step toward connecting file folders with evolution. In a paper that has been cited more than ten thousand times, White described our “intrinsic need to deal with our environments”-not just for survival but to avoid feeling helpless. White defined his key idea with one word, competence, meaning how well we feel we are dealing with our world. In 1977, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura extended White’s idea, concluding that one way we meet our intrinsic need to feel competent is by successful completion of tasks (48).
A professor at the University of Michigan, Stephanie Preston knows more than anyone about what she calls “acquisitiveness,” or how and why we get and keep things. To measure this, Preston created an object acquisition task that, like Andy’s grids for my team, gives Preston a computer-based experimental approach that can be carefully controlled.
In the first part of Preston’s task, participants see more than one hundred different objects, in random order, and one at a time. As each object appears on their screen, participants are asked whether they would like to acquire it virtually (the participants know they won’t actually get the objects). All the objects are free, and participants can acquire as many, or as few, as they want.
The objects vary in their usefulness (54).
Once they have made a choice about each object, participants are shown the full collection of everything they have added. A participant who has acquired seventy items, for example, is shown all seventy items together on the screen.
They are then encouraged to subtract objects.
First, participants are told that they may discard items from their collection, if they wish.
Then they are challenged to whittle down their collection so that it can fit into a shopping cart on the computer screen.
Finally, participants are asked to make the collection smaller still, so that it fits into one (virtual) paper grocery bag.
The goal is clear: everything needs to fit into one grocery bag. Participants even get real-time feedback, displayed on the computer screen, on whether they have subtracted enough stuff so that the rest fits. And yet, lots of participants fail to get down to a single bag. Many never make it past the shopping cart. People do not subtract their useless-not to mention imaginary-objects and, as a result, fail to accomplish the task.
Adding too much and then not subtracting enough may seem silly in experiments, but this same behavior turns sad when it is ruining real lives. Just as stress is linked to overeating, Preston has found that stress correlates with adding objects. In extreme cases, neglecting subtraction in the object decision task can be a sign of devastating anxiety and depression. In other words, those of us who choose to keep the free extension cord and coffee mug are exhibiting a milder version of the acquisitiveness that led to the demise of the Collyer brothers.
Like my team’s earliest studies, Stephanie Preston’s object decision task reveals a skewed approach to adding and subtracting. Some of Preston’s other research suggests there may be biological roots to this behavior (55).
Our instinct to acquire food may also extend to our adding of other things. By having participants acquire things while hooked up to machines that show brain activity, neuroscientists have confirmed that food acquisition as well as other types of acquisition activates the same reward system in the brain: the mesolimbocortical pathway. This pathway runs from the outer layer of our brains, the cerebral cortex, which aligns our thoughts and actions with goals; into our midbrain structures that house emotional life; and deep into our ventricle tegmental area, the origin of dopamine pathways.
Because it connects these thinking and feeling parts of our brains, the mesolimbocortical pathway makes it pleasurable to eat. This same reward pathway can also be stimulated by drugs like cocaine and by website designs that keep us clicking and scrolling as we add Facebook friends, battle Twitter trolls, or buy books. For hoarders, even used sticky notes can provide a hit.
Even simple behaviors require coordination between many areas of the brain. That said, finding the role of a specific reward system does confirm just how deep-rooted some of our adding might be. And because our acquiring behavior maps to a key motivation system in our brains, it just might inhibit us from pursuing alternatives-like subtracting (56-7).
Part II: Sharing Less
6. Scaling Subtraction: Using Less to Change the System
Like emergency room doctors, we now have a checklist that gives us room to act and adapt.
• Subtract before improving (e.g., triage)
• Make subtracting first (e.g., Jenga)
• Persist to noticeable less (e.g., Springsteen’s Darkness)
• Reuse your subtractions (e.g., doughnut holes)
These four steps can direct our expertise. We can keep the steps in our working memory as we go to work. Let’s call them the lesslist.
You will notice that these four items do not embody all the takeaways from this chapter: the “Sun City” artists’ reminder that we need to see systems to subtract from them; Lewin’s wisdom that removing barriers is the “good” way to change systems; and Koffka’s insistence that transforming systems is “not a principle of addition.” Nor do these four items summarize the first six chapters. Just as my sister brings her hard-earned expertise to emergency room triage, we need to bring our newfound subtracting skills to the lesslist (197).
8. From Information to Wisdom: Learning by Subtracting
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised, “To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day” (224).
Some downsides of being the latest generation to overlook Tzu’s advice were outlined in Cal Newport’s article “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” which got to its intended audience via The Chronicle of Higher Education, and then Twitter, content-aggregating websites, and, yes, in professors’ in-boxes. The gist of the article was that, while email is helpful for professors in some ways, the constant chatter has eroded precious time for uninterrupted thinking. Time to think is useful for many jobs-that’s why Leslie Perlow tried to save her software engineers from time famine. But for professors, distraction-free time is the difference between doing our job and, well, stupid. To manage a deluge of messages, we sacrifice our ability to enlarge ideas (224).
Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, deemed information so threatening that he devoted the second of his 124 end-of-life moral advice letters to “discursiveness in reading,” warning that reading too many books can tax bandwidth one might otherwise use to confront new situations.
In her book Too Much to Know, the historian Ann Blair finds that we have always found ways to store, summarize, and sort information, and we are doing so now. In this sense, data servers aren’t unlike Renaissance-era museums and libraries. Wikipedia-style summarizing traces its lineage to printed encyclopedias. Google, in sorting the world’s information, is akin to alphabetizing, or the Dewey Decimal System (227-8).
Storing, summarizing, and sorting are not subtracting. Slowing is the information equivalent of Ben’s no-bell. But Blair also unearthed one more historical strategy you will recognize: select. Like nature balancing adding and subtracting, we need to balance generating of information with selecting what is relevant and useful. Selecting relieves the tension between a wealth of information and poverty of attention.
Blair offers practical tips on this kind of triage. She recounts the selection filter used by the editors of Encyclopédie, a seventeen-volume alphabetical arrangement of Enlightenment ideas. The information contained, the authors decided, should be enough to rebuild society after a catastrophe. Information deemed unnecessary for that goal was subtracted. That is a high bar for relevance, but the principle is the same regardless of your goals.
Whether it is to rebuild society or to manage our in-box, selection requires that we distinguish ephemeral data from information. Most emails caught up in spam filters are clearly data, not information. In other cases, the distinction between data and information depends on the user. For most of my colleagues, an emailed warning to “whoever left their sandwich to grow mold in the break room refrigerator” is obviously just data. Others enjoy the sleuthing. The simplest selection filter is that, if you can’t use it, it’s definitely not information (227-9).
Takeaways
Here are your takeaways.
Invert: Try less before more. Subtract detail even before you act, as with triage. Then, once you are ready to make changes, put subtracting first-play Jenga. And remember, just because we now appreciate that less is not a loss, that does not mean that your audience and customers do. So, tell them about this book and, in the meantime, don’t “subtract.” Instead, clean, carve, and reveal. Add a unit of transformation.
Expand: Think add and subtract. Nature and Maya Lin show us that these are complementary approaches to change. Adding should cue subtracting, not rule it out. Try accessing a different multitude. The father might see what the bicycle designer misses. If you run out of multitudes, hire an editor. And don’t forget to zoom out to see the field, because stop-doings and negative numbers are not unpossible. Plus, the field is where the tension is, and removing it is the “good” way to change systems. So sure, add diversity, but subtracting racism is the prize.
Distill: Focus in on the people. Bikes do not balance, but toddlers can. Strip down to what sparks joy. Decluttering delights, and so does the psychology of optimal experience. Use your innate sense for relative difference. Taking away a mammoth is a bigger transformation than adding one. Embrace complexity, but then strive for the essence. Forget objects, remember forces-and pass mechanics. Subtract information and accumulate wisdom.
Finally, persist: Keep subtracting. Can you make less undeniable? Bruce Springsteen made Darkness visible. Costa Rica made neutrality noticeable. Chip made an empty go-kart funny. Don’t forget that you can reuse your subtractions, like doughnut holes. Subtract stuff to leave a legacy of options-like Sue, Leo, and Elinor (250).
Introduction: The Other Kind of Change
Subtracting is an action. Less is an end state. Sometimes less results from subtraction; other times, less results from not doing anything. There is a world of difference between the two types of less, and it is only by subtraction that we can get to the much rarer and more rewarding type.
In other words, subtraction is the act of getting to less, but it is not the same as doing less. In fact, getting to less often means doing, or at least thinking, more (15-16).
It’s been five centuries since Da Vinci defined perfection as when there is nothing left to take away; seven centuries since William of Ockham noted that it is “in vain to do with more what can be done with less,” and two and a half millennia since Lao Tzu advised: “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day” (17).
Ralph Waldo Emerson poetically links our thoughts and our physical world in his essay “Nature”:
Observe the ideas of the present day … see how timber, brick, lime, and stone have flown into convenient shape, obedient to the master idea reigning in the minds of many persons … It follows, of course, that the least enlargement of ideas would cause the most striking changes of external things.
William James, one of the founders of psychology, observed essentially the same thing in the other direction, describing in The Principles of Psychology how our homes and other material things become part of our personality (17).
Part I: Seeing More
2. The Biology of More: Our Adding Instincts
In 1959, Harvard University psychologist Robert W. White took a step toward connecting file folders with evolution. In a paper that has been cited more than ten thousand times, White described our “intrinsic need to deal with our environments”-not just for survival but to avoid feeling helpless. White defined his key idea with one word, competence, meaning how well we feel we are dealing with our world. In 1977, the Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura extended White’s idea, concluding that one way we meet our intrinsic need to feel competent is by successful completion of tasks (48).
A professor at the University of Michigan, Stephanie Preston knows more than anyone about what she calls “acquisitiveness,” or how and why we get and keep things. To measure this, Preston created an object acquisition task that, like Andy’s grids for my team, gives Preston a computer-based experimental approach that can be carefully controlled.
In the first part of Preston’s task, participants see more than one hundred different objects, in random order, and one at a time. As each object appears on their screen, participants are asked whether they would like to acquire it virtually (the participants know they won’t actually get the objects). All the objects are free, and participants can acquire as many, or as few, as they want.
The objects vary in their usefulness (54).
Once they have made a choice about each object, participants are shown the full collection of everything they have added. A participant who has acquired seventy items, for example, is shown all seventy items together on the screen.
They are then encouraged to subtract objects.
First, participants are told that they may discard items from their collection, if they wish.
Then they are challenged to whittle down their collection so that it can fit into a shopping cart on the computer screen.
Finally, participants are asked to make the collection smaller still, so that it fits into one (virtual) paper grocery bag.
The goal is clear: everything needs to fit into one grocery bag. Participants even get real-time feedback, displayed on the computer screen, on whether they have subtracted enough stuff so that the rest fits. And yet, lots of participants fail to get down to a single bag. Many never make it past the shopping cart. People do not subtract their useless-not to mention imaginary-objects and, as a result, fail to accomplish the task.
Adding too much and then not subtracting enough may seem silly in experiments, but this same behavior turns sad when it is ruining real lives. Just as stress is linked to overeating, Preston has found that stress correlates with adding objects. In extreme cases, neglecting subtraction in the object decision task can be a sign of devastating anxiety and depression. In other words, those of us who choose to keep the free extension cord and coffee mug are exhibiting a milder version of the acquisitiveness that led to the demise of the Collyer brothers.
Like my team’s earliest studies, Stephanie Preston’s object decision task reveals a skewed approach to adding and subtracting. Some of Preston’s other research suggests there may be biological roots to this behavior (55).
Our instinct to acquire food may also extend to our adding of other things. By having participants acquire things while hooked up to machines that show brain activity, neuroscientists have confirmed that food acquisition as well as other types of acquisition activates the same reward system in the brain: the mesolimbocortical pathway. This pathway runs from the outer layer of our brains, the cerebral cortex, which aligns our thoughts and actions with goals; into our midbrain structures that house emotional life; and deep into our ventricle tegmental area, the origin of dopamine pathways.
Because it connects these thinking and feeling parts of our brains, the mesolimbocortical pathway makes it pleasurable to eat. This same reward pathway can also be stimulated by drugs like cocaine and by website designs that keep us clicking and scrolling as we add Facebook friends, battle Twitter trolls, or buy books. For hoarders, even used sticky notes can provide a hit.
Even simple behaviors require coordination between many areas of the brain. That said, finding the role of a specific reward system does confirm just how deep-rooted some of our adding might be. And because our acquiring behavior maps to a key motivation system in our brains, it just might inhibit us from pursuing alternatives-like subtracting (56-7).
Part II: Sharing Less
6. Scaling Subtraction: Using Less to Change the System
Like emergency room doctors, we now have a checklist that gives us room to act and adapt.
• Subtract before improving (e.g., triage)
• Make subtracting first (e.g., Jenga)
• Persist to noticeable less (e.g., Springsteen’s Darkness)
• Reuse your subtractions (e.g., doughnut holes)
These four steps can direct our expertise. We can keep the steps in our working memory as we go to work. Let’s call them the lesslist.
You will notice that these four items do not embody all the takeaways from this chapter: the “Sun City” artists’ reminder that we need to see systems to subtract from them; Lewin’s wisdom that removing barriers is the “good” way to change systems; and Koffka’s insistence that transforming systems is “not a principle of addition.” Nor do these four items summarize the first six chapters. Just as my sister brings her hard-earned expertise to emergency room triage, we need to bring our newfound subtracting skills to the lesslist (197).
8. From Information to Wisdom: Learning by Subtracting
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised, “To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day” (224).
Some downsides of being the latest generation to overlook Tzu’s advice were outlined in Cal Newport’s article “Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” which got to its intended audience via The Chronicle of Higher Education, and then Twitter, content-aggregating websites, and, yes, in professors’ in-boxes. The gist of the article was that, while email is helpful for professors in some ways, the constant chatter has eroded precious time for uninterrupted thinking. Time to think is useful for many jobs-that’s why Leslie Perlow tried to save her software engineers from time famine. But for professors, distraction-free time is the difference between doing our job and, well, stupid. To manage a deluge of messages, we sacrifice our ability to enlarge ideas (224).
Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, deemed information so threatening that he devoted the second of his 124 end-of-life moral advice letters to “discursiveness in reading,” warning that reading too many books can tax bandwidth one might otherwise use to confront new situations.
In her book Too Much to Know, the historian Ann Blair finds that we have always found ways to store, summarize, and sort information, and we are doing so now. In this sense, data servers aren’t unlike Renaissance-era museums and libraries. Wikipedia-style summarizing traces its lineage to printed encyclopedias. Google, in sorting the world’s information, is akin to alphabetizing, or the Dewey Decimal System (227-8).
Storing, summarizing, and sorting are not subtracting. Slowing is the information equivalent of Ben’s no-bell. But Blair also unearthed one more historical strategy you will recognize: select. Like nature balancing adding and subtracting, we need to balance generating of information with selecting what is relevant and useful. Selecting relieves the tension between a wealth of information and poverty of attention.
Blair offers practical tips on this kind of triage. She recounts the selection filter used by the editors of Encyclopédie, a seventeen-volume alphabetical arrangement of Enlightenment ideas. The information contained, the authors decided, should be enough to rebuild society after a catastrophe. Information deemed unnecessary for that goal was subtracted. That is a high bar for relevance, but the principle is the same regardless of your goals.
Whether it is to rebuild society or to manage our in-box, selection requires that we distinguish ephemeral data from information. Most emails caught up in spam filters are clearly data, not information. In other cases, the distinction between data and information depends on the user. For most of my colleagues, an emailed warning to “whoever left their sandwich to grow mold in the break room refrigerator” is obviously just data. Others enjoy the sleuthing. The simplest selection filter is that, if you can’t use it, it’s definitely not information (227-9).
Takeaways
Here are your takeaways.
Invert: Try less before more. Subtract detail even before you act, as with triage. Then, once you are ready to make changes, put subtracting first-play Jenga. And remember, just because we now appreciate that less is not a loss, that does not mean that your audience and customers do. So, tell them about this book and, in the meantime, don’t “subtract.” Instead, clean, carve, and reveal. Add a unit of transformation.
Expand: Think add and subtract. Nature and Maya Lin show us that these are complementary approaches to change. Adding should cue subtracting, not rule it out. Try accessing a different multitude. The father might see what the bicycle designer misses. If you run out of multitudes, hire an editor. And don’t forget to zoom out to see the field, because stop-doings and negative numbers are not unpossible. Plus, the field is where the tension is, and removing it is the “good” way to change systems. So sure, add diversity, but subtracting racism is the prize.
Distill: Focus in on the people. Bikes do not balance, but toddlers can. Strip down to what sparks joy. Decluttering delights, and so does the psychology of optimal experience. Use your innate sense for relative difference. Taking away a mammoth is a bigger transformation than adding one. Embrace complexity, but then strive for the essence. Forget objects, remember forces-and pass mechanics. Subtract information and accumulate wisdom.
Finally, persist: Keep subtracting. Can you make less undeniable? Bruce Springsteen made Darkness visible. Costa Rica made neutrality noticeable. Chip made an empty go-kart funny. Don’t forget that you can reuse your subtractions, like doughnut holes. Subtract stuff to leave a legacy of options-like Sue, Leo, and Elinor (250).