To attain knowledge, add things every day

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, subtract things every day.

Lao Tzu

The meaning of the quote

In 1997, Steve Jobs sat in a product strategy meeting at Apple, the company he had co-founded and been pushed out of 12 years earlier. Apple was losing money and selling a dozen versions of the Mac. In the book Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs finally cut the meeting short.

“Stop! This is crazy.”

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a grid with 4 boxes. Consumer and professional went across the top, desktop and portable down the side. Apple would build 1 great computer for each box and cancel almost everything else. The next year, Apple made its first profit since 1995, and Jobs credited cutting its product families from 15 to 4.

The quote comes from chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching, written about 2,500 years ago. In the original, the second half is about following the Tao, or “the Way,” and this popular version calls it wisdom. The chapter goes on to say that the more you drop, the less you need to force.

Knowledge

Knowledge is the adding part, and school trained you well for it. You learn times tables, then fractions, then algebra. You pick up a language 1 word at a time, and each day stacks on the one before.

Adding works for facts and skills. The trouble starts when you use it for everything else. A packed week gets another planner app to manage it, and a messy essay gets another paragraph to explain it. The philosopher Nicholas Maxwell drew the line between the two when he said knowledge tells us how the world is and wisdom tells us how it ought to be. Knowing more doesn’t tell you what to cut.

Wisdom

Wisdom runs the other way. Researchers offered people $1 to fix a wobbly Lego structure so it could hold a brick above a little Lego figure. The easiest fix was to remove the one block holding up the roof, so it rested on the layer below. About 60% of people in one version of the test missed it and added more blocks instead, as a report on the study explained. Adding comes to mind first, and taking away needs a second look.

Wisdom is that second look. Sometimes that means dropping an activity or an app. The harder subtractions are ideas you carry around, like “I’m bad at math” or the belief that being busy means being productive.

Action steps

The quote asks for a little subtraction every day, so these steps are small enough to start today.

1. Ask the Lego question. Next time something isn’t working, ask what you could remove before you add anything. A crowded schedule or a 10-page essay often gets better when you cut first.
2. Drop something every day. Delete an app you open out of habit or turn down a favor you only agree to out of guilt. In a month, that’s 30 fewer distractions.

Knowledge piles up on its own if you keep learning, and wisdom grows in the space you clear.

About the author

Lao Tzu was a Chinese thinker who lived around the 6th century BC and is seen as the founder of Taoism. His name is a title that means “Old Master.” According to one legend, his mother carried him for 62 years, so he was born with a white beard.

According to the historian Sima Qian, who wrote his story down around 100 BC, Lao Tzu kept the royal archives for the Zhou kingdom. He worked there for years and watched the kingdom decline.

So he left. He gave up his post and headed west, and paintings often show him riding an ox. At the border pass, a gatekeeper named Yin Xi asked him to write down his teachings before he went. Lao Tzu wrote about 5,000 Chinese characters, handed them over and rode off.

Nobody knows where he went.

Those few pages became the Tao Te Ching, one of the most translated books in the world. About 2,500 years before Jobs cut Apple down to 4 boxes, Lao Tzu cut a lifetime of thinking down to 81 short chapters. You can find this quote in chapter 48 of the Tao Te Ching, next to his other short lessons on doing more by forcing less.

Resources

• Tao Te Ching (Book)
• Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less (Book)
• Steve Jobs (Book)
• Why Our Brains Miss Opportunities to Improve Through Subtraction (Article)
• Knowledge tells us how the world is (Article)
• Laozi (Wikipedia)