The squeegee blade shudders across the quarry tile, pushing a lazy arc of greasy, gray water. It’s supposed to go toward the drain, but it never does. Not really. The water hits the high spot just left of the grate and splits, a tired wave sloshing back toward the prep tables, another curling around the leg of the steel rack. Maria sighs, flips the squeegee, and pulls the water back, starting the whole miserable process again. It takes about eight minutes. Every night.

Meanwhile, in the cramped back office, the rest of the leadership team is brainstorming. The topic, scrawled on a whiteboard already crowded with 48 other ideas, is “Closing Speed.” Suggestions fly. A new task management app for the closing checklist. A faster, high-temperature dishwasher that costs $8,878. A laminated, color-coded chart detailing who cleans what. Someone even suggests a team-building retreat to boost morale. They are adding. Always adding. They are layering complexity upon complexity, chart upon app upon process, believing that the next addition will finally be the one that solves it all.

No one in that room mentions the water. No one talks about Maria and her nightly battle with gravity and poor construction. No one brings up the 30 collective minutes the closing crew spends coaxing dirty water down a drain that sits on a tiny, almost imperceptible hill. The friction is so constant it has become invisible. It’s just part of the landscape, the cost of doing business.

This is our default mode for problem-solving: addition. We see this here a gap, and we try to fill it with something new. A new feature. A new hire. A new rule. A new piece of software. We pile solutions on top of problems, hoping to bury the issue under the weight of our effort. But what if the most powerful, most profitable, most elegant form of innovation isn’t addition at all? What if it’s subtraction?

The Power of Subtraction Unveiled

I confess, I’m a recovering addition addict. My garage was a monument to this thinking. The clutter wasn’t the problem, you see this here, the problem was a lack of organization. So I bought clear plastic tubs. Then I bought a label maker to organize the tubs. Then I bought heavy-duty shelving to organize the labeled tubs. I spent an entire weekend and a few hundred dollars building a beautiful, orderly system for storing junk I hadn’t touched in years. The garage looked better, but it functioned worse. The actual space I had for my car-the primary function of the garage-had shrunk. The real solution wasn’t adding tubs; it was subtracting the 238 items I was holding onto for a hypothetical future that would never arrive.

It’s a pattern I see everywhere. We create complex workflows to manage a flawed process instead of fixing the process itself. We buy productivity apps to manage the overwhelming number of tasks we’ve assigned ourselves instead of questioning the tasks. The team in that restaurant is trying to optimize a broken system. They are trying to make the squeegee work more efficiently instead of asking why the squeegee is even fighting the floor in the first place.

My friend Daniel J. is a financial literacy educator, and his entire philosophy is built on this. When he first meets with a client drowning in debt and financial anxiety, they always expect him to give them a list of things to do. They want a new budgeting app, a side hustle, a complex investment strategy. They want to add their way out of the hole. Daniel does the opposite. His first question is always, “What can we remove?”

He doesn’t start with earning more. He starts with the one recurring payment that causes the most psychological pain. It might not be the biggest one. It’s often a relatively small subscription of $48 a month for a service they feel guilty about not using. He tells them to cut it. Not for the money, but for the psychic win. The act of deletion is empowering. Then he looks at their debts. He doesn’t have them build a 12-tab spreadsheet. He has them identify the one debt that keeps them awake at night-again, not always the one with the highest interest rate, but the one with the highest emotional cost-and they make a simple plan to obliterate it. He guides them to subtract the noise, the guilt, the complexity. The clarity that emerges from that negative space is where real financial progress begins.

“The clarity that emerges from that negative space is where real financial progress begins.”

“

I was thinking about this at the dentist’s office last week. The hygienist was a perfectly nice person, but she was determined to engage in small talk while her hands were in my mouth. I’m lying there, vulnerable, with a suction tube gurgling in my cheek, and she’s asking me about my plans for the weekend. The friction was immense. I’m trying to form a one-syllable answer that won’t cause me to gag on a polishing tool. She’s trying to fill a silence that doesn’t feel awkward to anyone but her. The whole interaction is an additive script. We’re supposed to fill silence. We’re supposed to ask pleasant questions. But what if the most comfortable, most efficient, and most human interaction in that moment was subtraction? What if she just embraced the silence and let me focus on not drooling on myself? The best experience would have been created by removing the expectation of conversation.

This impulse to add is born from a fear of looking like we’re not doing enough. A manager who cancels a project looks decisive, but a manager who cancels three recurring meetings to give their team back eight hours a week feels… passive. Even though the latter is often far more valuable. Deleting code is one of the most satisfying parts of software engineering, because it means you’ve found a simpler, more elegant way to solve a problem. Yet, performance is so often measured on commits, on lines of code written. We measure the additions.

We celebrate the groundbreaking new feature, but we rarely celebrate the team that removed three confusing buttons from the interface, which cut user error by 68%. We praise the company that launches a dozen new initiatives, but we overlook the one that had the courage to kill its oldest, most time-consuming legacy product, freeing up immense resources to focus on what truly mattered. The heroes of subtraction are invisible, because when a problem is truly removed, we forget it ever existed.

The Invisible Heroes of Clarity

Think about the best product experiences you’ve had. The unboxing of an Apple product wasn’t great because of what was in the box; it was great because of what wasn’t-no messy manuals, no tangle of useless cables. Google’s homepage was revolutionary not for its features, but for its lack of them. It was a single box on a white page. It was an act of profound subtraction in a world of cluttered portals.

This isn’t an argument for doing less, but for achieving more by doing less wrong. It’s about redirecting our energy from managing complexity to eliminating it. It’s about being brave enough to stop and ask the forbidden questions. Instead of “What should we do next?” we might ask, “What are we doing now that is holding us back?” Instead of “What can we add to make this better?” we should be asking, “What one thing, if we removed it, would make everything else simpler?”

“What one thing, if we removed it, would make everything else simpler?”

“

That’s where the real innovation lives. It’s not in the next app or the next checklist on the whiteboard. It’s in seeing the invisible hill on the floor that’s making Maria’s job harder, every single night, and having the wisdom to just flatten it.