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…