Via Negativa: Improving By Removing

Via negativa is a rare but priceless approach to improving your decision-making, habits, and systems. It focuses on saying what something is not, rather than trying to describe what it is. In other words, it teaches you not what to do, but what to avoid. Sometimes it’s easier to improve backwards: by doing less unimportant, harmful things. It is simpler to figure out what we shouldn’t do, how things do not work, and to criticize in general. Human beings are designed to seek out the negative side of things — since, in natural environments, this meant quickly spotting and evading threats that could have been life-and-death.

Hence it’s much easier for us to find the bad rather than the good in things. Knowing what not to do is easy. Wealthy people got there by not getting broke. Chess grandmasters win by not making losing moves. You, too, can greatly reduce your chances of failure if you consistently avoid things you should avoid. In practice, via negativa is a different mindset for improvement. Instead of addition — one more diet, exercise plan, goal — you embrace subtraction — one less cheat meal, Netflix binge, impulsive purchase. By eliminating the harmful or unnecessary, you streamline your life. Simultaneously, you become more functional and efficient by concentrating on what’s important.

Legendary investor Charlie Munger put forth the idea that there is far more we don’t know than we know. It’s an obvious fact in retrospect. But we don’t practice it very often. Recognizing how ignorant we are is key. As Naval Ravikant said, “I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.” In Munger’s words, “It’s remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Chew that idea for a moment. Would it be easier to become really smart, or to avoid becoming stupid? What sounds more attainable: becoming wealthy, or avoiding going bust?

Put differently, it’s best to improve by avoiding obvious mistakes. Being “consistently not stupid”, as Munger said, is not as easy as it sounds. It requires acting with patience and restraint. Think in subtraction. Writing is a key example of via negativa. Getting better at it means removing what’s unnecessary. Eliminating useless jargon improves clarity. Let via negativa linger in your mind. You’ll quickly see that experts tell you what not to do at least as much as they tell you what to do: don’t invest in this, don’t eat this, don’t do this, don’t do that. Leaner, simpler ideas are more powerful.

Real-life implications of via negativa:

• Personal Lifestyle: you feel overwhelmed by constant digital distractions. Instead of adding more productivity apps and techniques, you might simply start removing unnecessary notifications, reducing social media use, and decluttering your workspace. Let elimination work its magic. Productivity enhanced. Laser-focus back.

• Software Development: a development team is struggling with their bloated codebase that is hard to maintain. Instead of piling on new features, they refactor the existing code. Translated: they remove redundancies and simplify complex functions. The streamlined software architecture becomes more efficient, easier to navigate and debug, and quicker to adapt to new requirements.

• Product Design: a smartphone manufacturer finds that adding too many features is starting to confuse users and slow down their phone. The company decides to focus on removing unnecessary features and optimizing core functions. The resulting product is simpler, more intuitive, and delivers a faster and more satisfying user experience.

• Business Strategy: a company faces declining profits. It has inefficient and outdated processes and unnecessary steps. Rather than investing heavily in new initiatives, it reviews its operations and eliminates non-value-adding activities. By cutting the fat, the company gets back to better profit margins.

• Health and Wellness: an individual struggles to balance a busy, stress-filled lifestyle with fitness initiatives. Instead of adding more wellness routines, they opt to remove time-wasters (e.g. excessive TV watching, binge-eating patterns, social media consumption) from their daily routines. This results in improved energy levels, better health, and reduced stress.

How you might use via negativa as a mental model: (1) listen for the noise — assess your system, project, team, or lifestyle, and find and list components that only contribute risk, complexity, or risk; (2) tune it out — before you add new features or components, ask whether removing existing elements from that list would work towards the same outcome; (3) don’t miss details — look for ways to streamline workflows and cut non-essential tasks, as the leaner your processes are, the less you will have to work to attain the same result; (4) dream of the future — consider how removing negative elements would result in sustainable improvements down the line; (5) implement, track, repeat — after eliminating non-value-adding activities, track performance, and repeat this cycle of cutting the fat.