Via Negativa: The Wisdom of Subtraction in Work and Life

Via Negativa: The Wisdom of Subtraction in Work and Life

The Concept

Via negativa is a Latin phrase meaning “the negative way” or “by way of denial.” In philosophy and theology, it refers to the practice of defining something by what it is not, rather than what it is. In practical life, it means achieving better outcomes through removal and subtraction rather than addition and accumulation.

The principle suggests that we often know what is wrong more easily than what is right, and that removing harmful elements produces more reliable improvements than adding supposedly beneficial ones. It’s the wisdom of “less is more” grounded in ancient philosophy and validated by modern experience.

This approach contrasts sharply with our default mode: when facing problems, we instinctively add—more features, more processes, more meetings, more complexity. Via negativa invites us to consider the opposite: what if we subtracted instead?

Historical and Philosophical Roots

Ancient Origins

Via negativa has deep roots in multiple philosophical and religious traditions:

Taoist Wu Wei: The concept of effortless action through non-action. Lao Tzu wrote: “In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.”

Apophatic Theology: Christian mystics described God not by what He is, but by what He is not, recognizing that removing misconceptions often brings us closer to truth than adding descriptions.

Stoic Premeditation: Marcus Aurelius and Seneca practiced premeditatio malorum—imagining worst outcomes not to add worry, but to remove fear through preparation and acceptance.

Buddhist Concept of Anatta: Enlightenment through understanding what the self is not, removing layers of illusion rather than accumulating knowledge.

Modern Formulation

Nassim Nicholas Taleb brought via negativa to modern prominence in Antifragile, arguing that in complex systems, removing fragility works better than trying to predict and control outcomes. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner, famously said: “It is 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.”

Via Negativa in Technical Leadership

For Principal Engineers and technical leaders, via negativa offers profound practical wisdom:

1. Architecture Through Subtraction

The Addition Trap: Facing system complexity, teams often add more services, more layers, more abstractions, more tools. The codebase grows, and complexity compounds.

Via Negativa Approach:

• What can we remove without losing functionality?
• Which services can we consolidate?
• Which features are rarely used and can be deprecated?
• Which abstractions create more confusion than clarity?

Real Example: A team struggling with a microservices architecture of 47 services consolidated to 12 services by ruthlessly removing unnecessary boundaries. Latency improved, bugs decreased, and developer velocity doubled—not through adding capabilities, but removing unnecessary complexity.

Principle: You know with high certainty which architectural decisions have caused problems (remove them). You can’t know with certainty which new architectural patterns will solve problems (be cautious adding them).

2. Meeting Culture Through Subtraction

The Addition Trap: Low team alignment leads to adding more meetings—daily standups become daily syncs become daily check-ins become weekly all-hands become bi-weekly retrospectives.

Via Negativa Approach:

• Cancel a meeting. Did anything break?
• Remove required attendees. Does the meeting still function?
• Eliminate recurring meetings and make them opt-in. Which ones do people re-create organically?

Real Example: A VP of Engineering cancelled all meetings for one week, then only reinstated those that teams specifically requested. 40% of meetings never came back, and employee satisfaction scores increased significantly.

Principle: The absence of bad meetings creates more value than the presence of good meetings creates value.

3. Process Through Subtraction

The Addition Trap: Quality issues lead to adding more process—code review checklists, approval gates, quality assurance stages, documentation requirements, compliance checks.

Via Negativa Approach:

• Which process steps could we remove for one sprint?
• What happens if we eliminate approval requirements?
• Can we remove mandatory documentation and see what people create naturally?

Real Example: A team removed mandatory design documents for features under a certain complexity threshold. Instead of chaos, engineers created lightweight design docs naturally for complex features while moving faster on simple ones.

Principle: Remove processes that prevent bad outcomes rather than adding processes to create good outcomes. Trust and simplicity scale better than rules and complexity.

Via Negativa in Personal Life

Career Development Through Subtraction

Traditional Advice: Add more skills to your resume—learn another programming language, get another certification, attend more conferences, build more side projects.

Via Negativa Approach:

• What activities drain energy without corresponding career value?
• Which skills on your resume are you mediocre at? (Remove them from your positioning; focus on excellence in fewer areas)
• Which career opportunities should you say no to?
• What professional relationships are neutral or negative? (Reduce time investment)

Principle: Career success comes more from avoiding major mistakes and energy drains than from accumulating marginal skills. Become excellent at fewer things rather than competent at many.

Productivity Through Subtraction

Traditional Advice: Add productivity tools, techniques, apps, methods—task managers, time blocking, morning routines, productivity systems.

Via Negativa Approach:

• What am I doing that I could simply stop?
• Which tools create more friction than value?
• What commitments can I remove from my calendar?
• Which communication channels can I leave?

Real Example: A Principal Engineer quit Slack entirely, responding only to email and direct messages in GitHub. Initial fear of missing out gave way to doubled deep work time and the realization that truly important communications find their way to you.

Principle: Productivity through elimination scales infinitely; productivity through optimization has diminishing returns.

Decision Making Through Subtraction

Traditional Approach: Gather more information, add more analysis, consider more options, consult more people.

Via Negativa Approach:

• What options can I immediately eliminate as clearly wrong?
• What information won’t change my decision?
• Which choices remove future decisions? (Commitment devices)
• What would I advise a friend to avoid?

Charlie Munger’s Inversion: “Tell me where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” Focus on avoiding stupidity rather than seeking brilliance.

Principle: You can identify bad decisions more reliably than good decisions. Eliminate the obviously wrong, and the remaining options are often equivalent.

Practical Implementation Framework

The Subtraction Audit

Conduct a monthly review across these dimensions:

Professional:

• Meetings I attend: Which add no value?
• Tools I use: Which create more friction than value?
• Projects I’m involved in: Which align poorly with my strengths or team goals?
• Processes I follow: Which exist for unclear reasons?

Personal:

• Subscriptions and services: Which do I rarely use?
• Commitments: Which drain energy disproportionate to benefit?
• Digital distractions: Which apps create compulsive checking?
• Relationships: Which consistently leave me feeling worse?

For each item, ask: What would happen if this didn’t exist? If the answer is “nothing bad” or “probably improvement,” consider removing it.

The “Subtraction First” Decision Protocol

When facing a problem:

1. Pause addition: Resist the impulse to immediately add something
2. Identify removals: What could be removed to address the root cause?
3. Test subtraction: Remove it temporarily and measure impact
4. Permanent removal: If no negative impact, make removal permanent
5. Only then add: If subtraction doesn’t solve it, consider adding

The Anti-Resume

Warren Buffett suggests making two lists: 25 career goals. Circle your top 5. The other 20? Actively avoid them until the top 5 are achieved.

Create an “anti-resume”—a document of things you explicitly choose NOT to do:

• Technologies I will not learn (so I can master others)
• Roles I will not pursue (so I can excel in my chosen path)
• Projects I will not take on (so I can focus on high-impact work)
• Work cultures I will not tolerate (so I can thrive where I am)

This clarifies your path through elimination, which is often clearer than defining it through addition.

Common Resistance and Responses

“But What If I Need It Later?”

This fear of missing out drives accumulation. Counter it with:

• The cost of maintaining things you might need exceeds the cost of re-acquiring them if needed
• In most cases, if you truly need it later, it’s still available
• The cognitive load of “keeping options open” is real and significant

“More is Better”

Cultural conditioning suggests value comes from accumulation. Counter it with:

• Every addition has maintenance cost—code, commitments, possessions
• Optionality has a hidden cost: decision fatigue and attention fragmentation
• The best work often comes from constraints, not abundance

“I Worked Hard to Get This”

Sunk cost fallacy makes us reluctant to remove things we invested in. Counter it with:

• Past investment is irrelevant; only future value matters
• Removing something that no longer serves you honors your growth
• Holding on due to past investment doubles the cost

Reflection Questions

Practice via negativa through regular reflection:

1. What caused problems in the last month? (You know this with high certainty—can you remove it?)

2. What am I doing that I can’t articulate a clear reason for? (Convention? Momentum? Fear?)

3. If I were designing my life/work from scratch today, what would I not include? (Why is it still there?)

4. What adds complexity without corresponding value? (Tools, processes, commitments?)

5. What am I keeping “just in case” that I haven’t used in 6+ months? (Code, subscriptions, skills, relationships?)

6. If I could only keep 3 priorities, which would I choose? (What does that say about the others?)

Conclusion

Via negativa offers a profound reframing: progress often comes not from doing more, but from doing less; not from adding better things, but from removing bad things; not from seeking optimal decisions, but from avoiding terrible ones.

For technical leaders juggling infinite demands and complexity, this philosophy provides liberation. You don’t need to optimize every system, attend every meeting, learn every technology, or solve every problem. Instead, focus on identifying and removing what clearly doesn’t work. The space created by subtraction allows what remains to flourish.

As Michelangelo reportedly said about sculpting David: “I didn’t create David. I simply removed everything that wasn’t David.” Your best work—your clearest thinking, your most impactful contributions, your most fulfilling life—may already exist beneath layers of accumulated complexity.

Your task isn’t to add more. It’s to remove what obscures what matters.

Start today: identify one thing in your professional life and one thing in your personal life that you’ll remove this week. Notice what happens in the space it leaves behind. Often, what grows there naturally is far more valuable than what you removed.

The wisdom of via negativa: sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing—or better yet, less than nothing. Remove.