Via negativa
Improvement by subtraction. Removing harm beats adding good.
Latin for "the negative way." A theological term Taleb borrowed for ethics, health, and business. The idea: many improvements come not from adding something new but from removing something harmful. Medicine starts with "first, do no harm." Sculpture is what you remove from the marble.
The principle is counter-intuitive because subtraction feels less impressive than addition. Cutting a bad practice, ending a bad relationship, stopping a failing project, removing a noisy meeting. None of those look like progress on the dashboard. They are.
For operators, via negativa is a discipline of asking, periodically: what should I stop doing? What should we remove? What's harmful that we're tolerating? The honest answers usually produce more value than the equivalent question about adding things.
Examples in the wild
Many companies grow margins more by killing unprofitable product lines than by launching new ones. The subtraction is less visible than the addition but often more valuable.
Buffett's success is famously about avoiding bad investments rather than picking miraculous ones. Via negativa in portfolio terms.
Most personal health improvements are subtractions: less alcohol, less sugar, less screen time, less news. Adding kale doesn't help as much.
Via negativa is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.