Subtract Quotes

“The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised, “To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“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.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“can help us subtract wrong ideas. In these cases, analogies work because they feel like accommodation, in that they allow us to keep one foot in what we know while we seek new ground with the other. Studies of science learning show that presenting a new idea along with new evidence fails to remove misconceptions. The new idea plus the new evidence cannot overpower the embedded misconception. But if we take the same new idea and support it with an analogy to a valid idea that’s already set in the learner’s mind, then the misconception becomes vulnerable.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Shafir, a psychology professor at Princeton, and Mullainathan, then an economics professor at Harvard, found that poor people are, indeed, more likely to make bad decisions. So far, so good for those who wish to blame poverty on the poor. However, Shafir and Mullainathan show that this common inference should be reversed. It is not that bad decisions make one poor. It is that the cognitive effects of being poor lead to bad decisions. A high school student forced to spend her bandwidth thinking about whether to buy food for her younger siblings or books for her studies finds it harder to also be thinking about the content of those books. What’s more, with her bandwidth already taxed by the books-or-food dilemma, she has less space to process new information about her situation, even if it is a program offering free books.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“The average American encounters one hundred thousand words a day, more than are in this book. In one internet minute (circa 2017), there were half a million tweets and more than three million Google searches. Our rate of email production? One hundred fifty-six million—per minute.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Costa Rica’s reprioritized spending has improved literacy and health, to the point where its citizens now live longer lives, on average, than Americans.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“No matter how much practical value we derive from internet searches, as long as our use of Google doesn’t cost us anything, this act is excluded from GDP calculations. So is open-source work, like contributions to Wikipedia.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“GDP does what it was set up to do—but no more. It measures production, not welfare. As a result, it misses some useful less.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Loraxes who like data may note that our rate of economic growth is matched almost exactly by our use of fossil fuels, which tracks almost exactly with the carbon dioxide we have added to the atmosphere. Given the direct relationship between gross domestic product and harmful emissions, these Loraxes might even contend that the only way to stop plundering the planet is to limit economic growth.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“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)”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“So after you have subtracted detail to find the essence of the system you wish to change, consider subtracting first, as in Jenga. Then persist to noticeable less. Last but not least, don’t forget that you can reuse your subtractions.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Legos encourage endless adding, especially when you have a dad who supports your habit. In Jenga, the rules promote balance. Jenga forces us to subtract first, requiring that we pull out a block from one of the lower levels before we add to the top level. Sure, Lego’s adding approach has been good for business; but so has Jenga’s mandate to subtract first. It was the game’s novel subtracting rules that Leslie Scott copyrighted, to the tune of one hundred million copies sold.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Thinking in Systems emphasizes finding the goals of the system. As Meadows put it, we discover these goals by asking, “What is the system trying to achieve?”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Braess’s and Koffka’s remove-may-improve wisdom is not limited to roads and traffic. It’s been found in electrical power grids, biological systems, and even in my senior season of college soccer.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“The platitude above, however, while favored by sports announcers and motivational speakers, turns out to be a subtraction-blind mistranslation of what Koffka actually wrote. His original—and more accurate—wisdom was: “The whole is something else than the sum of the parts.” Koffka was miffed by the “is more than” misinterpretation. He knew that the whole can also be less than the sum of the parts. As he repeatedly clarified, to no avail: “This is not a principle of addition.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Kurt Lewin was not the only scholar (or Kurt) from the Gestalt school to gift us subtractive wisdom. Kurt Koffka, in between being married four times to the same two women, originated the cliché about high-performing systems: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Daniel Kahneman put it this way: “Lewin’s insight was that if you want to achieve change in behavior, there is one good way to do it and one bad way. The good way is by diminishing restraining forces, not by increasing the driving forces.” Lewin’s “bad way” was to add—whether incentives for good behavior or punishments for bad behavior—because this increases tension in the system. Promising Ezra a cookie if he reads a book instead of watching a show increases his motivation not to swipe on his iPad. But promising Ezra a cookie does not make it any easier for him to resist the iPad. In fact, promising Ezra a cookie can make him more frustrated if he succumbs to the iPad temptation. I can pursue the same goal, getting Ezra to engage with a book instead of stare at a screen, by removing the tempting iPad from the situation, placing it out of sight, or accidently letting it run out of batteries overnight. This is an example of Lewin’s “good” way of changing a system, because it actually relieves tension.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“One way to transform a system is to add new forces that are working toward our goal. Such forces were added when Leo Robinson and the dockworkers sent food and medical supplies to anti-apartheid groups, or when the “Sun City” artists donated their proceeds. Invisible forces can also be against us, though, in which case improvement comes from subtracting them. We can divest from apartheid. We can speak up to dismantle racism.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“In general, systems are made of things and ideas; connections between them; and a surrounding field. That should all sound familiar. It is how we have described the situations we can change by adding and subtracting. Systems earn the “complex” tag when their behavior is unpredictable because of the dynamic interactions within them.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Those who sell things use our loss aversion to their advantage. Car dealers urge us to take that no-strings-attached test-drive, because the more we feel like we have the car, the more value we assign to it. Amazon.com gave me unlimited free two-day shipping for a year. I wasn’t going to pay the annual fee to get the service, but I now pay that same fee not to lose”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Word valences are determined by asking thousands of people to classify thousands of words as positive, negative, or neutral. When these answers are averaged, most words come out as neutral. Fewer than one in five words has a negative valence; even the word less has a neutral valence. As you might have guessed, though, the word subtract is viewed negatively.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“author Stephen King’s observation that “to write is human, to edit is divine.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Getting back to subtraction: lazy less doesn’t spark flow because it is not a challenge. There is no transformation.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Ben was rightfully proud of his gimmick, and if he wasn’t always so helpfully skeptical toward my ideas, I may have thought twice about pointing out that saying no is not subtracting. When someone rings the no-bell, it’s because they haven’t added some new activity, which is not the same as taking away an activity from what they were already doing.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Food, clothing, materials for housing, and mechanical power are not the only things we’ve chased since the mid-twentieth century. We have also given ourselves more to do. No matter how judicious your employers’ vacation policy, it’s likely that medieval peasants got more time off than you do.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“I still catch myself thinking about adding and subtracting as an either-or proposition. One of my final passes through these pages was to make sure I was representing adding and subtracting as complementary. Let me be clear here: to find the options we are missing, we need to go from thinking add or subtract to thinking add and subtract.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“I was surprised to learn that Savannah’s design was enlightened in more ways than one. James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia and drew up the plan for Savannah, was very progressive. Georgia was founded to house relocated inmates—debtors released thanks to Oglethorpe’s push for prison reform in England—and under his watch, which lasted until 1742, slavery was prohibited in Georgia. So, for that matter, was aristocracy. Oglethorpe’s vision of social equity extended to his layout for Savannah. By serving as shared public space, the now-famous squares fostered community engagement and participation in city affairs.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“One inference here is that independent types might overlook subtraction when, in our focus on individual objects, we fail to consider taking away from the surroundings.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“There is no question that adding and culture are inseparable. In key ways, as we’ve seen, the earliest civilizations were defined by more. Humans who no longer needed to spend all day searching for food added more things: pyramids, buildings, and clothes.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less

“Schmidt laid out a new-and-improved theory in his article “First Came the Temple, Then the City.” As that title asserts, and is increasingly believed, building the temple at Potbelly Hill could have been what brought the hunter-gatherers together in the first place. The idea of the temple provided the first excuse for disparate bands to convene. Then, the long-term commitment needed to build and then maintain it drove the hunter-gatherers to seek less transient food sources. This, Schmidt contends, is what led to agriculture. Findings from sites around Potbelly Hill confirm that, within the thousand years following the temple’s construction, settlers had domesticated wheat and corralled livestock.”
― Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less