In the past month, I’ve been doing a lot of unfollowing on LinkedIn.
This involves me manually clicking a button and intentionally choosing to unfollow someone.
I’ve noticed two things happening as a result: 1. I’ve seen more (useless) ads, 2. I’ve seen updates from people that I haven’t heard from in years.
Some of these people represent relationships that I am genuinely interested in rekindling, and some are relationships that I have no recollection of ever establishing.
The strangest part about this unfollowing process, is what I discovered about LinkedIn’s own method to, “Improve My Feed.”
When I discovered and clicked on what I thought would be a very helpful button titled, “Improve My Feed,” the only option that LinkedIn gave me was to start following new people. There was no option to easily unfollow existing people.
In other words, LinkedIn’s default approach to improving something is to add, not subtract.
I fundamentally disagree with this. There is so much beauty to be found in subtraction.
**
When the musician Sam Smith (pronouns: they/them) was 21, they found themselves in a studio with their friends Jimmy Napes and Will Phillips. Sam was there in search of a song that they felt was missing from an album they were working on.
After some messing around, there was a moment when Will was on the piano and he played three simple chords. Sam recalls standing up in that moment and telling everyone to stop. Those chords made Sam want to cry.
Before that moment, Sam had been working with musicians who had shown them lots of complex chords and complex music, but when Sam heard Will play those three chords, they just sounded honest. Reflecting on those chords, Sam said:
“Do you know what it is? It’s the space. There’s space. My head was busy and the space left room for me to speak my mind.”
The song that the three of them went on to create that day, Stay With Me, has over 2.5 billion plays on Spotify at the time of writing this sentence.
Other musicians were trying to add things to improve Sam’s music. When Will subtracted it all, Sam finally found the song they were searching for.
**
When he was visiting a museum in Taiwan, the author and teacher Arthur Brooks was struck with a powerful insight. It came from a conversation he had with a museum guide. It went like this (lightly edited for brevity):
Guide: When you as a Westerner think of a work of art yet to be started, what image pops into your head?
Brooks: An empty canvas.
Guide: That’s because you think of things as starting from nothing and through your own initiative coming into existence. I think about a work of art not being started as an uncut boulder of jade, where the sculpture is inside it, and I have to take everything away until I find it.
Guide (continuing): That’s also the difference in philosophy between East and West, about life, about success. You Westerners think that if you’re going to have enough, add more, add more, add more, then it’s going to be perfect. But by the time you’re 45 years old, if you’re remotely successful, more brushstrokes means a denser, darker canvas, and it’s not getting better. It’s getting uglier.
Guide (continuing): We understand that the job on your last day is to chip away the last piece of Jade, when it’s perfect. We take away. We’re subtracting. That’s the difference.
**
Try subtracting and see what difference it makes for you.
