Subtract

Subtract Plot Summary

Introduction

Imagine standing in your home, surrounded by possessions that once promised joy but now feel like a burden. Picture your calendar packed with meetings, your inbox overflowing with emails, and your mind cluttered with information that leaves little room for clarity. In a world that constantly urges us to add more—more stuff, more commitments, more information—we've forgotten a fundamental truth: sometimes the most powerful change comes not from adding, but from taking away. This book reveals a startling insight: humans systematically overlook subtraction as a solution to problems. When faced with challenges, we instinctively add new elements rather than removing existing ones, even when subtraction would be more efficient, elegant, and effective. Through compelling stories—from the removal of a freeway that transformed San Francisco's waterfront to Marie Kondo's life-changing magic of tidying up—This book offers a revolutionary approach to improvement. You'll discover how to recognize opportunities for subtraction in your physical spaces, your schedule, and even your thinking patterns. More importantly, you'll learn to overcome the psychological, cultural, and economic forces that push us toward constant addition, ultimately finding greater satisfaction, productivity, and wisdom through the power of less.

Chapter 1: The Embarcadero Story: Subtraction That Transformed a City

When the Klotz family visited San Francisco, the Embarcadero waterfront was at the top of their to-do list. They strolled along a palm tree-lined promenade, visited historic piers and the Ferry Building, and watched harbor seals while their young son Ezra played safely nearby. It was a picture-perfect urban experience—one that wouldn't have been possible without an act of subtraction so counterintuitive that it took an earthquake to make it happen. For decades, the Embarcadero Freeway had stretched more than a mile along San Francisco's eastern waterfront, a double-decker concrete monstrosity that blocked precious views and access to the bay. Built after World War II as part of America's highway expansion, it carried tens of thousands of vehicles daily. But in the 1970s, a woman named Sue Bierman, who had been appointed to the city's planning commission, began meticulously studying the freeway's impact. After nearly a decade of analysis, Bierman's commission made a radical recommendation in 1985: get rid of the freeway entirely. The proposal was met with fierce resistance. Local businesses feared losing customers. When San Franciscans voted on removing the freeway, the results weren't even close—for every voter in favor, two wanted to keep it. The matter seemed settled until the Loma Prieta earthquake struck on October 17, 1989, damaging the structure beyond easy repair. Even then, many pushed to rebuild it. But the city's board of supervisors, by the narrowest possible six-to-five margin, finally approved the planning commission's original recommendation to remove the freeway. The results were transformative. The decade after removal saw a 50 percent increase in housing and a 15 percent increase in jobs around the waterfront, far outpacing gains in other parts of the city. The predicted traffic nightmares never materialized as people found new routes and transportation methods. By the ten-year anniversary of the demolition, the San Francisco Chronicle reported it had become "hard to find anyone who thinks ripping down the Freeway was a bad idea." The Embarcadero story illustrates a profound truth: subtraction can create value in ways addition never could. By removing a structure that seemed essential, the city revealed natural beauty, created public space, and sparked economic vitality. Yet this solution was so counterintuitive that it took extraordinary circumstances—and extraordinary persistence from people like Sue Bierman—to make it happen. This pattern repeats throughout our lives. We instinctively add solutions—more rules, more features, more meetings—when removing elements might solve our problems more elegantly. The Embarcadero teaches us to question our additive defaults and consider: what might be better if it simply weren't there?

Chapter 2: Leo Robinson and the Dockworkers: Dismantling Apartheid by Taking Away

In the early 1980s, as Nelson Mandela remained imprisoned in South Africa, an unlikely hero emerged in the struggle against apartheid—a dockworker named Leo Robinson working at San Francisco's Pier 80. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, Robinson had moved to the Bay Area as a young boy. After serving in the navy and later working on the docks, he became increasingly politically engaged, particularly in the anti-apartheid movement. When the ship Nedlloyd Kimberley docked at Pier 80 in late 1984, Robinson and his fellow dockworkers made a radical decision. They unloaded most of the cargo but deliberately refused to touch anything coming from South Africa. The steel, auto parts, and wine—what Robinson called "bloody" cargo—remained untouched on board. Robinson's group was so influential that none of the nearby ports would accept the apartheid cargo either. The ship sat stranded, a visible symbol of resistance. "We're not going to move that cargo," Robinson declared, "not until apartheid is dismantled." His stance wasn't merely symbolic—it was strategically brilliant. By refusing to unload goods, the dockworkers made the economic costs of apartheid visible and immediate. Their action sparked daily protests beside the stranded ship and triggered a cascade of financial consequences. Soon, the city of Oakland pulled all its funds out of companies doing business in South Africa. California followed, reallocating more than $11 billion previously invested there. Similar divestment spread to other cities, states, and nations. Multinational corporations including General Electric, General Motors, and Coca-Cola rushed to sever ties with the apartheid regime. When Mandela was finally released and spoke in Oakland, he personally thanked Robinson and his fellow dockworkers for being "the front line of the anti-apartheid movement in the Bay Area." What makes Robinson's approach so powerful is that it worked through subtraction rather than addition. Instead of simply adding more protests or sending aid to anti-apartheid groups, Robinson identified and removed a key source of support for the oppressive system. By taking away economic cooperation, he helped dismantle apartheid itself. This principle applies broadly to social change. When facing entrenched problems, we typically think of what more we can do—more programs, more funding, more awareness campaigns. But Robinson's example shows that sometimes the most effective approach is to identify and withdraw the resources, behaviors, or structures that enable harmful systems to persist. By asking "What can we stop doing?" rather than only "What more can we do?", we open powerful new possibilities for creating positive change.

Chapter 3: Ezra's Lego Bridge: Why We Overlook Subtraction

The author's epiphany about subtraction came from an unexpected source—building Legos with his three-year-old son, Ezra. They were constructing a bridge, but faced a problem: the support towers were different heights, making it impossible to span them. As the author reached behind him to grab a block to add to the shorter tower, Ezra did something surprising—he removed a block from the taller tower instead. "In that moment, I realized my impulse had been wrong," the author writes. "Taking away from the tall support was a faster and more efficient way to create a level bridge." This simple insight became the foundation for years of research into what he calls "subtraction neglect"—our systematic failure to consider removing elements as a solution to problems. To test this phenomenon, the author and his research team conducted a series of experiments. In one, participants were asked to modify a Lego structure to make it more stable or aesthetically pleasing. Only 12 percent chose to remove blocks, even when subtraction would have been more efficient. Similar results emerged when people were asked to improve musical loops, writing samples, and travel itineraries—consistently, fewer than 20 percent of participants chose to subtract elements. Even in completely abstract tasks with no inherent value to the elements involved, the pattern persisted. When asked to make asymmetrical grid patterns symmetrical using the fewest possible moves, only 20 percent of participants chose to remove squares rather than add them—despite both options requiring the exact same effort (a mouse click) and subtraction often being the more efficient solution. What explains this persistent blind spot? The research revealed several factors. First, subtraction simply doesn't come to mind as readily as addition. When the researchers explicitly reminded participants that they could "add or subtract" elements, rates of subtraction increased significantly. Second, mental bandwidth matters—when participants were cognitively taxed by having to perform a secondary task, they were even less likely to think of subtractive solutions. This cognitive bias has profound implications for how we approach problems in every domain of life. We build more complex systems when simpler ones would work better. We add rules and regulations without removing outdated ones. We accumulate possessions, commitments, and information without considering what we might beneficially eliminate. "Our neglect of subtraction isn't just a quirk—it's a fundamental limitation in how we think about change," the author concludes. "And once we recognize this pattern, we can begin to overcome it, consciously looking for opportunities to improve through removal rather than addition." By understanding the psychological roots of our addition bias, we gain access to an entirely new dimension of potential solutions that have been hiding in plain sight.

Chapter 4: Kate Orff's Lexington: Revealing Hidden Value by Removing

In the summer of 1833, the city of Lexington, Kentucky faced devastation as cholera swept through the population, killing more than 500 of its 6,000 residents. The outbreak was linked to the Town Branch Creek, which flooded regularly, mixing with sewage and contaminating the city's drinking water. Over subsequent decades, Lexington responded by channeling, controlling, and eventually covering the creek entirely with buildings, factories, and roads. By the 21st century, the waterway that had given life to the city was almost completely hidden from view, reduced to little more than a drainage ditch in the few places it remained exposed. In 2013, as Lexington sought to revitalize its downtown, city leaders held a design competition. The winner was Kate Orff, founder of a small firm called SCAPE. Her winning proposal, "Town Branch Commons," didn't add more buildings or infrastructure—instead, it proposed revealing what was already there by strategically removing concrete to uncover portions of the historic creek. "We're not creating something new," Orff explained. "We're revealing something that's been there all along." Her design called for cutting through limestone to create water windows, removing pavement to create a multiuse trail following the creek's path, and transforming a section of downtown into a public park where people could once again connect with the water that had originally given birth to the city. What makes Orff's approach remarkable is that it required more effort, not less. She had to think deeply about the city's unique limestone geology, its rural bluegrass surroundings, and the complex water management systems that had been built over generations. Rather than simply adding new elements to the urban landscape, she chose to subtract strategically, revealing the natural beauty and history that had been buried beneath layers of development. The results were transformative. Orff's design quickly attracted more than $20 million in federal grants, $7 million from Kentucky, and $12 million from local sources. Construction began in 2020, creating not just an aesthetic improvement but a functional one—the exposed waterway would help control flooding, filter water, and provide green space connecting downtown to the surrounding countryside. Orff's work exemplifies what the author calls "post-satisficed less"—subtraction that goes beyond the easy, obvious removals to find hidden value. It requires more thought and effort than addition, but yields results that couldn't be achieved any other way. By removing rather than adding, Orff didn't just create a prettier city—she reconnected Lexington with its history, improved its environmental resilience, and created public spaces that serve multiple functions at once. This principle extends far beyond urban design. In our own lives, we often build layer upon layer of solutions, covering up problems rather than addressing them at their source. Orff's example challenges us to look beneath the surface, to consider what might be revealed if we were willing to remove rather than simply add. Sometimes, the most valuable elements in our lives, work, and communities are already there—they've just been buried under accumulated additions that no longer serve us.

Chapter 5: Costa Rica's Carbon Neutral Vision: Subtracting for a Sustainable Future

In 2007, Costa Rica made a bold announcement that stunned the environmental world: the small Central American nation would become carbon neutral by 2021, the bicentennial of its independence from Spain. While other countries were still debating whether climate change was real, Costa Rica had committed to the most ambitious environmental goal of any nation—to remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as it produced. What made this vision particularly remarkable was that Costa Rica approached it through subtraction rather than merely addition. Instead of focusing exclusively on adding more renewable energy sources (though they did that too), they emphasized removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through reforestation. The nation, which had once been almost entirely covered in forest before widespread deforestation for agriculture, began an aggressive campaign to restore its tree cover. "We realized that forests are not just beautiful scenery for tourists," explained Carolina Mauri, who helped shape Costa Rica's climate policy. "They are carbon removal machines." The country implemented a system that paid landowners for environmental services, effectively making carbon capture a profitable activity. Farmers who might have cleared more land for agriculture could now earn money by planting and maintaining forests instead. The results were dramatic. Costa Rica reversed its deforestation trend, increasing forest cover from about 20 percent of the country in the 1980s to more than 50 percent today. Nearly all of its electricity now comes from renewable sources. And while they ultimately pushed back their carbon neutrality target to 2050 (joining many other nations with similar goals), their progress has earned them recognition as one of the greenest countries in the world. Costa Rica's approach illustrates a crucial insight about environmental challenges: we cannot solve climate change through addition alone. Simply adding more efficient technologies while continuing to emit greenhouse gases is insufficient. We must also subtract—removing carbon from the atmosphere and eliminating emissions-intensive activities. Costa Rica did this not just through reforestation but also by taking the radical step of banning oil exploration entirely, ensuring fossil fuels would remain in the ground. The Costa Rican example offers a powerful lesson for addressing complex systemic problems. When the current situation already exceeds sustainable boundaries—as with atmospheric carbon levels—we need to subtract first. Their vision wasn't just about slowing the rate at which they added carbon to the atmosphere; it was about actively removing what was already there. By making this subtraction visible and central to their national identity, Costa Rica created a model that other nations and organizations have begun to follow. This principle applies beyond environmental challenges. When any system becomes overloaded—whether with carbon, commitments, or complexity—addition alone cannot restore balance. We must be willing to subtract, to remove what no longer serves the system's purpose, even when doing so requires more initial effort than simply adding more solutions.

Chapter 6: Springsteen's Darkness: The Art and Impact of Noticeable Less

Bruce Springsteen refers to his 1978 album "Darkness on the Edge of Town" as his "samurai record, all stripped down for fighting." The description is apt—the album represented a radical departure from Springsteen's previous work, defined not by what he added but by what he deliberately took away. On his earlier albums, Springsteen had proven himself capable of verbose, meandering lyrics. The opening line to "Blinded by the Light," the first song on his debut album, was a mouthful: "Madman drummers bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat." Compare that with the opening line to "Racing in the Street" from Darkness: "I got a '69 Chevy with a 396." The difference is striking—a deliberate stripping away of excess to reveal the essential. This subtraction wasn't limited to lyrics. Springsteen applied the same ruthless editing to the album's instrumentation. "When the drums are forceful but moderate, they leave room for a big guitar sound," he explained in his autobiography. "When the guitars are powerful but lean, you can have drums the size of a house." Each element was carefully considered, with anything unnecessary removed to create a sound that was more powerful precisely because of what wasn't there. Perhaps most remarkably, Springsteen cut more than forty recorded tracks down to just ten for the final album. Some of the songs he eliminated later became hits for other artists—"Because the Night" for Patti Smith, "Fire" for the Pointer Sisters. This willingness to subtract even excellent material that didn't serve the album's core vision required tremendous discipline and clarity. The result was transformative. Rock critic Dave Marsh called Darkness "nothing less than a breakthrough," an album that "changes fundamentally the way we hear rock and roll, the way it's recorded, the way it's played." It was named 1978's album of the year by the prestigious New Music Express and remains a critical favorite decades later. The stripped-down aesthetic influenced generations of musicians across genres, from Pearl Jam to Rage Against the Machine. Springsteen's example reveals a crucial insight about subtraction: to be effective, it must be noticeable. When we remove elements, we face the challenge that what's no longer there isn't immediately visible. Springsteen overcame this by making his subtraction so deliberate and consistent that the absence itself became the defining feature of the album. The space between notes, the economy of lyrics, the restraint in arrangement—these absences were as carefully crafted as any presence would have been. This principle of "noticeable less" applies far beyond music. When we subtract in our own lives and work, we need to make our removals visible and intentional. Rather than apologizing for what's missing ("Sorry my presentation is so short"), we can highlight the value that comes from deliberate elimination ("I've distilled this down to just the essential points you need"). By persisting in our subtraction until it becomes undeniable, we transform what might be perceived as lack into a powerful statement of intentionality and focus. As Springsteen demonstrated, sometimes the most impactful change comes not from adding more but from the careful, persistent removal of everything that isn't essential to your vision.

Chapter 7: Marie Kondo and the Joy of Letting Go

When the author introduced his university course on subtraction, he had barely begun his overview when a student raised her hand and asked, "You mean, kind of like Marie Kondo?" The question revealed how the Japanese tidying expert had become a cultural touchstone for the power of less. Through her bestselling book "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up" and her Netflix series, Kondo has transformed millions of homes—and minds—with her radically simple approach to decluttering. What makes Kondo's method revolutionary isn't just that she encourages people to get rid of things—it's how she reframes the entire process. Rather than the traditional organizing advice to discard what you don't want or need, Kondo flipped the script: keep only what "sparks joy" and thank everything else before letting it go. This subtle shift transforms decluttering from a dreaded chore into an almost spiritual practice of alignment with one's true desires. "The best way to find out what we really need," Kondo writes, "is to get rid of what we don't." Her method isn't about minimalism for its own sake but about creating space—physical and mental—for what truly matters. When a client hesitates over an item, Kondo doesn't pressure them to discard it. Instead, she asks them to hold it and notice how it makes them feel. This embodied approach bypasses intellectual justifications ("I might need this someday") and connects people directly with their intuitive response. The results can be profound. People who complete Kondo's process often report not just tidier homes but clearer minds and even transformed relationships. "Tidying your physical space allows you to tend to your psychological space," Kondo observes, recognizing the deep connection between our external environments and internal states. By removing physical clutter, we often discover mental and emotional clarity we didn't know was possible. What's particularly instructive about Kondo's approach is how she makes subtraction fun and rewarding. The "spark joy" criterion transforms decluttering from a process of loss to one of curation and celebration. The ritual of thanking items before discarding them acknowledges their service while releasing any guilt about letting them go. These seemingly simple practices overcome powerful psychological barriers to subtraction, including our tendency to value things more once we own them. Kondo's phenomenal success reveals something important about human nature: we crave less, even as we continue to accumulate more. Her method works because it aligns with our deep desire for clarity, purpose, and meaning—qualities often obscured by excess rather than enhanced by it. When given permission and a practical method to subtract, people embrace it enthusiastically, suggesting that our addition bias may be more cultural and habitual than innate. The broader lesson from Kondo's approach is that effective subtraction often requires reframing. Rather than focusing on what we're giving up, we can focus on what we're gaining—space, clarity, focus, and joy. By making the benefits of less immediately tangible and emotionally rewarding, we can overcome our resistance to letting go and discover the surprising power of subtraction in every area of life.

Chapter 8: From Information Overload to Wisdom: Learning by Subtracting

The average American encounters one hundred thousand words daily—more than are contained in this entire book. In a single internet minute, users generate 156 million emails, half a million tweets, and three million Google searches. We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom, a predicament that ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu anticipated thousands of years ago when he advised: "To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day." This distinction between knowledge and wisdom lies at the heart of our modern information crisis. Cal Newport, in his provocative article "Is Email Making Professors Stupid?", argued that constant digital chatter has eroded the precious time for deep, uninterrupted thinking that academic work requires. The irony wasn't lost on the professors who received the article—they immediately began discussing it via email, further fragmenting their attention. Our mental bandwidth—our capacity to process information—is biologically limited. We can handle about 60 to 120 bits per second, roughly enough for one conversation. When we exceed these limits, we experience what Herbert Simon called "a poverty of attention." This cognitive overload doesn't just feel uncomfortable; it actively impairs our thinking, leading to poor decisions, shallow analysis, and missed insights. The author experienced this firsthand as an engineering student struggling with mechanics. Despite attending classes and completing homework, he maintained only a C average until he had an epiphany before the final exam. Instead of trying to memorize dozens of equations, he stripped the course down to its essence: force equals mass times acceleration (F = ma). By discarding less useful information and focusing on this fundamental principle, he earned a 98 on the final exam, shocking himself and his professor. "My breakthrough came by discarding less useful ideas," he explains. "I didn't need to know a bunch of forces and masses and accelerations, just F = ma." This mental pruning—removing extraneous concepts to allow core principles to flourish—mirrors the physical pruning that occurs in our brains during sleep, when microglial cells eliminate unused neural connections to strengthen the important ones. This principle extends beyond academic learning to how we construct all knowledge. We tend to build understanding by adding new information to existing mental models. But sometimes those models themselves are flawed, and no amount of additional information will correct them. Real wisdom often requires subtracting wrong ideas, not just adding correct ones. Thomas Kuhn, in his influential book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," showed how the most profound advances in scientific understanding required dismantling fundamental assumptions. Galileo couldn't simply add his insights to Aristotle's physics; he had to identify and remove Aristotle's misconceptions about motion. Similarly, our own breakthroughs often depend on our willingness to question and remove deeply held but incorrect beliefs. The path from information overload to wisdom, then, isn't about acquiring more data—it's about curating what we already have. By consciously weeding out distractions, outdated ideas, and unnecessary complexity, we create mental space for deeper understanding. As the author concludes, "When we subtract information from our mental storerooms, our processing speeds up like a computer after closing a memory-intensive program that has been running in the background." In a world of endless information, the ability to subtract may be our most valuable intellectual skill.

Summary

The key to thriving in our overloaded world is not adding more, but strategically taking away. Throughout this book, we've seen how subtraction—whether removing a freeway to transform a city, editing songs to create a breakthrough album, or eliminating clutter to spark joy—can create value in ways that addition never could. Yet our biological instincts, cultural conditioning, and economic systems all push us toward constant accumulation, making subtraction a chronically overlooked solution. To harness the power of less, start by inverting your thinking—look for what you can remove before considering what to add. Make subtraction noticeable by persisting until what's missing becomes a deliberate statement rather than an apparent lack. Focus on the humans involved rather than just the objects or systems you're changing. And remember that effective subtraction often requires more thought, not less—the reward for this extra effort is solutions of elegant simplicity that addition alone could never achieve. By mastering the art of taking away, you'll discover options you've been missing and gain access to an entirely new dimension of improvement in every area of life.

About Author

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Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz is a Professor at the University of Virginia, with appointments in Engineering, Architecture, and Business. He studies the science of design: how we transform things from how they are to how we want them to be. He has secured over $10 million in competitive funding to support this new area of research. To share research insights with those who can use them, he has written more than 80 articles and two books. To apply these insights to address climate change and systemic inequality, Leidy also works directly with organizations including the World Bank, the World Design Organization, and ideas42. Before becoming a professor, Leidy managed the design and construction of large engineering projects and before that he played professional soccer.

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