In our striving to improve our lives, our work, and our society, we overwhelmingly add. We overlook the option to subtract from what is already there.

Substraction

If I give you some lego pieces and a bridge with one smaller tower, how would you finish the work? Sounds like an easy question, right? But believe it or not, the answer can teach us a lot about how we make choices in our life. Leidy Klotz and his team made this experiment for real and, unsurprisingly, most of the participants decided to add more lego pieces to the bridge rather than removing some pieces to finish it. The conclusion is that we intuitively add more things and overlook the simplicity of removing things. This can explain why we get so easily overwhelmed by distractions, belongings, projects, ideas and objectives. There is a time when we can’t fill the glass indefinitely and, as the experiment shown, the way our brain naturally works is not here to help. At some point, we need to get back to the essential in order to make our life more balanced and fulfilling, and substracting is part of the equation.