Subtract Your Way to Success

Photo by Tim Schmidbauer on Unsplash

When we tackle challenging problems, we use mental shortcuts to speed up our decision-making process. But shortcuts come with risks: They can make us miss perfect solutions that lie along other routes.

One common mental shortcut may be blinding us to 50% of the possible solutions we could find in the world. When we face a problem, our initial instinct is to think about what we can add to the scenario in order to make progress: What tools can we introduce? What can we buy to make life easier? What ingredients should we add to this recipe?

But the best solution isn’t always about what you can add. It’s often about what you can subtract.

Comic by SMBC comics

The power of subtraction

In a paper published earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Gabrielle Adams at the University of Virginia tested people’s problem-solving skills. They gave people a set of problems and analyzed their solutions to see how much they involved adding a feature versus subtracting a feature.

I’ve recreated one of their simplest tasks below. Here’s the question: What’s the easiest way to make this grid perfectly symmetrical in top-to-bottom and…