The Art of Subtracting

My space keeps filling up. A kitchen drawer jammed with cables I can no longer identify. A hard drive full of screenshots I took once and never looked at again. 17 books purely bought by impulse on my shelf that I never will find time to read. Honestly, I'd rather have less of all this. And yet the pile only grows while nothing old ever seems to leave.

Nowhere is this more obvious than at work or in group projects. It isn't physical mess this time. Collaborating with other people only makes it worse. A recurring call, a shared folder, a sign-off step - almost nobody ever cancels these, yet something new joins the queue every week. Before you notice it happening, your calendar is packed with calls nobody needs, your drive is stuffed with pages nobody opens, and your process is loaded with steps whose original purpose has long since evaporated. Keep stacking without ever clearing the base, and eventually the whole thing tips over.

So why does this happen so much at work specifically? I think it comes down to collaborating with a group of people. Members of the group wants to pitch in, and the bar for adding something, spinning up a new page, looping one more person into a call, sits close to zero. You don't need consensus. Removing something, on the other hand, means consent. Groups, it turns out, are far better at voting things in than voting things out. There's a second force at play too: pulling something someone else built can read as an insult, or as shutting them out, which makes people even less willing to be the one holding the knife.

I’m trying to shift my perspective here. Think of a photographer who shoots three hundred frames purely to find the one worth keeping once everything else is cropped away. Nobody lands on the right shape on the first try. Subtraction is how you get from a bloated, tangled first draft to something small enough with the right quality.

Michelangelo said: "The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the redudant stone."

Steve Jobs lived by that same kind of subtraction. He saw teamwork through that exact same lens of grinding away the rough edges. He used to tell the story of an old rock tumble putting in ordinary, rough stones with a bit of grit, letting them bang into each other, and watching them come out polished. As Jobs said: "It's through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, that they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones. In that friction of different ideas is where the magic is."

Subtracting and grinding down is the only way to go from a messy, excessive starting point to a simpler and better finish. Even if social norms or committees always try to push to add, add, and add some more, I’m going to put my own energy towards focus and subtracting.