To attain knowledge, add things every day.
To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.
I’m sure you have a story like this. In preparing for our annual family camping trip, I perform the obligatory equipment check. Of course, all the flashlights need new D-cell batteries. Off to the local hardware store I go, since we don’t stockpile batteries in the refrigerator the way some folks do. When I return home, the fun begins. I’m not talking about the camping trip. I’m talking about trying to get the batteries open. The plastic packaging is super heavy-duty, slick and hard to grasp. It’s deceiving, because it looks like it should easily pull apart. It doesn’t, and for the life of me, I can’t get the thing open. Feelings of inadequacy creep in: I must be missing something. It can’t be this hard, can it? I begin blame shifting, wondering what possessed the package designers to think they needed this clearly excessive level of protection for a $6 purchase. A nearby package of light-bulbs—perhaps the most fragile household items on the planet, protected by nothing more than a flimsy bit of corrugated cardboard—is laughing at me. Frustration is mounting, as I’ve already wasted four minutes, and I need to open three of these. I grab the kitchen scissors and try to cut into the case, but the double-reinforced edge stops me cold. I need to somehow pierce the softer middle with something sharp. Steak knife to the rescue. I’m able to make a cut, not without a good bit of muscle, mind you, but I’m in. I try prying apart the opening, slicing my thumb on the razor-sharp plastic edge I’ve created. I’m bleeding. That’s when the cursing starts.
You can imagine the rest.
You’re right to think this is a silly story about a benign annoyance. I tell it only to introduce in a lighthearted way a challenge far more serious and frustrating than trying to break open a package of batteries. It’s the larger and more serious problem we all face: thriving in a world of excess everything.
The world is more overwhelming than ever before. Our work is deeper and more demanding than ever. Our businesses are more complicated and difficult to manage than ever. Our economy is more uncertain than ever. Our resources are scarcer than ever. There is endless choice and feature overkill in all but the best experiences. Everybody knows everything about us. The simple life is a thing of the past. Everywhere, there’s too much of the wrong stuff and not enough of the right. The noise is deafening, the signal weak. Everything is too complicated and time-sucking. Excess everything is choking us.
Amazingly, as consumers, we seem to put up with it. We tolerate the intolerable: stupidly standing in some silly line, searching for what we want through the convoluted floor plan of the local mammoth warehouse store, or struggling through the maze of whatever automated voice mail system we’re up against—or opening a package of D-cell batteries.
You’d think that if we hate all the excess as a consumer, we would absolutely detest it as a producer. But we don’t. The reason we don’t is that we see no clear and immediate path to turning things around. We know that the situation isn’t going away. We know that we can’t run or hide from it. So we shrug our shoulders and go along with the herd.
But.
At the heart of every difficult decision lie three tough choices: What to pursue versus what to ignore. What to leave in versus what to leave out. What to do versus what to don’t. I have discovered that if you focus on the second half of each choice—what to ignore, what to leave out, what to don’t—the decision becomes exponentially easier and simpler. The key is to remove the stupid stuff: anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly. (Battery packaging exhibits all seven qualities in a rather inglorious way.) Better yet, refrain from adding them in the first place.
This is the art of subtraction: when you remove just the right thing in just the right way, something good usually happens.
I believe subtraction is the path through the haze and maze, one that can allow us to create clarity from complexity and to wage and win the war against the common enemy of excess. And if that’s so, if subtraction is the new skill to be gained, we need a guide to developing it. If subtraction is the new thinking, we need a fresh take on how to rethink everything we do. If subtraction is our weapon against excess everything, we need to know how to use it in battle.
That’s not easy, because subtraction doesn’t come naturally or intuitively—not to me, not to anyone. From the days of our ancestors on the savanna, we are hardwired to add and accumulate, hoard and store. This not only helps explain why the world is the way it is, it also lays out the real challenge: battling our instinct. We need to acknowledge and understand that to employ subtraction is to think differently. I mean that quite literally: neuroscientists have shown, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), that addition and subtraction require different brain circuitry.
That’s where The Laws of Subtraction comes in, drawing on this scientific fact to guide new and innovative thinking on how people can produce better results by artfully and intelligently using less. I cannot emphasize the word better enough. We hear a lot about doing more with less. You won’t hear that from me. You will only hear about doing better with less. Big difference. There simply is no limit on better.
The Laws of Subtraction is meant to be a guide to creating more engaging experiences not only for others but also for ourselves. It is the experience that intrigues me, because whether it springs from a product, a process, a service, a project, a new business start-up, or a personal performance strategy, it is the experience that matters most. It is the experience that stays with us, and it is the experience that makes something meaningful. Focusing on the experience puts us in touch with the more emotional side of ideas. Understanding the human factors involved in producing an experience that fundamentally improves how we think, feel, or behave is what makes the design of any particular thing interesting.
The Laws of Subtraction is the book I’ve wanted to write for some time. I have broached the subject as a subtopic in my two previous books, first in The Elegant Solution and then in In Pursuit of Elegance, in which I devoted a chapter to subtraction as an element of elegance. I offer this final treatment on the power of less for two reasons.
Reason 1: Subtraction is what people want me to talk about in speeches and seminars. They ask me for rules of thumb to help them design and deliver more compelling experiences for themselves, their companies, and their customers. My friend and fellow author, the brilliant Daniel H. Pink, advised me not long ago at a corporate conference where we were both speaking just before he took the stage: “Subtraction is your meme,” he told me. “It’s out there; it’s growing.” He thought I should follow it and own it.
Best. Advice. Ever.
Reason 2: I am far from mastering subtraction, but for over a decade I’ve been a student of it: chasing down ideas of various kinds that are simple and powerful at the same time. My search began during my tenure as an advisor to Toyota; continued through an eight-year run during which I learned to appreciate the Japanese culture, the Eastern perspective, and how to “think lean”; and became most intense when I left that partnership in 2006 and launched myself into the world of public writing, speaking, and coaching. I was influenced greatly by the work of John Maeda, whose elegant book The Laws of Simplicity was published in the same year. In many respects, The Laws of Subtraction is an acknowledgment of the impact John Maeda’s work has had on my own; beyond that, it picks up where his book left off: delving into and unraveling his tenth law: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.”
I distill Maeda’s tenth law into six simple rules:
1. What isn’t there can often trump what is.
2. The simplest rules create the most effective experience.
3. Limiting information engages the imagination.
4. Creativity thrives under intelligent constraints.
5. Break is the important part of breakthrough.
6. Doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing.
I claim no credit for inventing these rules. They come from my search and research. In the last five years I’ve tracked down and examined over 2,000 ideas that to some degree fit a single criterion: they achieve maximum effect through minimum means. Those ideas span a wide spectrum of human endeavor: business, government, academia, arts, athletics, science, architecture, design, technology, and psychology. It is the common characteristics and recognizable patterns in these ideas that give rise to the six laws of subtraction, which when taken together can be thought of as a code for the creative mind.
I have organized the book around these six laws, devoting a single chapter to each one. I attempt to accomplish the two things I think a good book should do well: inform and inspire. I’ll use a variety of methods to do so. In each chapter, I’ll introduce you to a few illustrative examples of how a particular law was applied in a powerful way. I’ll draw on both ancient Eastern philosophy and modern Western science wherever possible to help explain what goes on in our brains and offer some insight into why a certain law is so effective.
As for inspiration, I invited some of the most brilliant, noteworthy, and fascinating people I know to contribute their personal stories of subtraction and share with you how they embraced the power of less in their work and lives. There are over fifty stories, each one incredibly powerful and insightful, each one useful in helping you apply the laws of subtraction to your own work and life in ways I cannot. I’ve grouped them loosely according to the six laws, and they can be found after each chapter in the “Silhouettes in Subtraction” section.
I’m sure you realize the inherent contradiction at play in writing and publishing a book: it is an act of addition, not subtraction. If I could figure out how to get this particular portfolio of insight and inspiration into your head with an affordable form of magic that removes the written word entirely, I would. The best I can do is to follow John Maeda’s guidance within my given constraint: subtract the obvious and add the meaningful.
My job in writing The Laws of Subtraction is both to challenge you and to help you to think a bit differently by using subtraction to do better with less and find clever solutions to your most difficult challenges, whatever they may be. If I do my job right, this book will have great meaning for you. If I don’t, I’m sure you’ll let me know.
I often ask other authors to tell me the one thing they would like their readers to take away from their books. For The Laws of Subtraction, it is quite simply this:
When you remove just the right things in just the right way, something good happens.
— Matthew E. May