i can't prescribe to you what the best thing to subtract is but if you think about it in those ways, i think you'll be better off. A lot of the scientific revolutions and personal thinking revolutions have come from getting rid of old stuff as much as they do for adding new stuff. Think about action is a way to make your life better. And that's how everybody, you know, that everybody thinks like that, ye.
We pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings.” We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: we don’t subtract. Leidy Klotz’s pioneering research shows why. Whether we’re building Lego® models or cities, grilled-cheese sandwiches or strategic plans, our minds tend to add before taking away. Even when we do think of it, subtraction can be harder to pull off because an array of biological, cultural, and economic forces push us towards more. But we have a choice — our blind spot need not go on taking its toll on our cities, our institutions, and our minds. By diagnosing our neglect of subtraction, we can treat it.