When Michelangelo was asked how he carved David out of a block of marble, the story goes that he gave a counterintuitive answer. He said David was already in there. He just chipped away everything that wasn't David.

It's a good way to think about getting better at things in life, and it’s exactly the opposite to how we usually try. Our instinct is always to add. A new supplement, a new app, a new habit, a new goal, a new tool. Adding feels like progress, because you can see it. But the highest-leverage move is sometimes to take something away.

You can rarely be certain a new thing will help. Will the supplement work? Will the productivity system stick? Maybe.

But you can be very certain about what's hurting you. Doomscrolling instead of getting a full night’s sleep is clearly worse.

That means removing a known problem is a high-confidence bet, while adding a speculative good is a gamble. One is close to a sure thing. The other is a maybe. Yet we spend almost all our energy chasing the maybe.

Every time you add something, you import its baggage too. A new supplement comes with unknown interactions. A new tool comes with setup, upkeep, and one more thing to manage. A new habit needs time and willpower you have to take from somewhere else. Addition always carries hidden costs.

Removing a known problem is clean. Cut the thing that's actively dragging you down and you get the full benefit with no new downside attached.

Before you add anything to an area of your life, find the single worst input and remove that first.

You'll get more from cutting the nightly junk food and the late night scrolling than from any supplement stack you could buy. Remove the worst thing before adding a good one.

Pick any area you want to improve, ask "what's the one thing here doing the most damage?" You’ll be surprised how quickly the answer comes to you.

Subtraction is invisible. Nobody congratulates you for the meeting you canceled, the food you didn't eat, or the problem that never happened because you avoided it completely. Addition is visible and feels productive. Removal feels like nothing, even when it changes everything.

So one of the most reliable levers for improving your life is also one of the most overlooked. Sometimes you don’t need to change your whole life, you just need to get rid of the two or three things you know are ruining it.

Got a second? Give some feedback on today’s article so we can keep making improvements to The Manifold.

PS — It’s kind of like spring cleaning for your mind.