I gave two examples, which deeply touched me.
1. After the double-decker highway was demolished, the traffic became smoother.
Traffic congestion is a modern normal state, and the normal solution is generally to build more roads. The realistic feeling is that our roads are getting wider and wider, but the congestion is more serious.
Because this is a systematic project, all the choices of all traffic participants work together to lead to this situation. It can't be solved by just building roads.
For example, the author said that there was an overpass somewhere in a country, and the direction of re-planning was to dismantle it to solve the traffic congestion problem, which attracted the opposition of the surrounding stakeholders. After many twists and turns, it took several years to finally turn this place into a public park. The traffic flow is smoother, but the income of surrounding merchants increases.
This is an example where less is more.
Another example is that blacks refused to disembark goods, which actually contributed to the collapse of apartheid policy in South Africa.
Mandela of South Africa especially thanked a worker leader in the campaign against racism. He is a dock stevedore. Unable to bear racial oppression, he was the first to strike out. All the workers generally responded, which led to the inability to transport goods throughout South Africa, the damage to the interests of employers and the change of business environment, which objectively accelerated the process of the collapse of apartheid policy.
Rejection and withdrawal are typical subtraction thinking and have achieved unexpected results.
3. Why do people get used to addition? It's human nature.
In reality, in fact, most people are used to addition, which may be due to human nature.
Zhuangzi? Everyone must know the story of "chop and change" in The Theory of Everything. A monkey keeper gave four chestnuts in the morning and three chestnuts in the evening. The monkey was unhappy. Later, he gave them three chestnuts in the morning and four chestnuts in the evening. All the monkeys were very happy. In fact, the total expenditure of monkey keepers remains the same, but the monkey experience is quite different. This principle is now also used by many HR and bosses who do compensation and benefits, and it is the result of fully considering human nature.
4. In the case of extremely rich information, whether it is "996" or "007", we have been living in the inner volume. Why is everyone's life getting busy?
A study published in the journal Nature found that when people want to change the status quo, we are always more inclined to add things than to simplify the current things.
But it turns out that blindly adding is not the optimal solution in life. How to grasp the big and let go of the small and refine the paradigm of thinking and action is the way to improve work efficiency and happiness in life.
Therefore, this book not only discusses the deep reasons why people like to do addition, but also provides a set of rules of subtraction thinking to help us simplify the complex and go into battle lightly in our limited life.
It encourages each other.