Addition By Subtraction

Bob is still new to organized cycling events. He lives in Indiana, and we met when my firm merged with his. He rode the 24-mile Melting Mann and 36-mile Barry Roubaix in 2019. We also drove to Spartanburg, SC for the 74-mile Assault on Mount Marion that year. In 2020 we were going to do an organized ride in the Italian Dolomites, but that was the plague, you know. In 2019 he was riding a cheap, heavy hybrid bike. I told him how much more comfortable and quicker he would be on a higher quality steed. He and his wife set some sales goals with the promise that he could buy a bike once he hit the goal. He found a top-of-the-line Specialized Roubaix on sale for about half off at the end of the 2019 season (original price tag was over $9,000). He hadn’t quite hit the quarterly goal yet but was on pace and didn’t want to miss this super-duper discount. He bought the bike, but his wife wouldn’t let him ride it until he bagged the bonus. So, he kept it, unridden, in their bedroom!

This sweet new ride came with Dura-Ace electronic shifting, awesome wheels and disc brakes. It is a lovely machine. Since we didn’t go to Italy last summer, we did a four-day M-22 trip in northern Michigan. On the new bike he was about 25% faster than on the hybrid. We had a ball climbing hills, tasting wine, and being tourists. We were signed up for the 2020 Melting Mann which was deferred for 17 months until September 2021. Bob drove up and we met in the parking lot. As we started a little warm up ride, he immediately said, “I don’t have any gears!” It turns out that if your bike is leaning against the seat of your car and the shift lever is depressed, the battery will drain, leaving you with a single-speed bike.

In 2018 Julie and I ordered a custom tandem bike from Co-Motion. We picked the size, components and most importantly, a cool paint job! One of the parts we picked was an electronic shifting drivetrain. I had heard about and experienced poor shifting on tandems, in part because they are so long and there can be some mushiness in the extended-length cable back to the rear derailleur. Last fall we were excited to join our club’s fall foliage ride. It is a beautiful course when trees are at their peak color splendor.?The start is about 40 miles from our house, so we loaded the tandem into the van, making sure the shift levers were not hitting anything! At the start we headed out with our crew, and I went to shift to the big ring. . . but couldn’t. A quick check showed that the battery was full, and all of the wires were seated properly. Later, a mechanic at our local bike shop found that the shifting system needed a firmware update! Who knew that our bike has software??

All of this raises a question both mechanical and philosophical: does adding complexity improve a bike? And the bike can stand in for almost any product, system or relationship. Does adding complexity improve democracy? A family? A kitchen appliance? Does my gas range really need to be connected to the internet? Take a look at yahoo.com and then compare google.com. Now I know that all of these tech giants have privacy and monopoly issues but just looking at the user experience, is yahoo better because of all the ads, pictures, videos and animations?

Leidy Klotz has written an insightful book called Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less. He points out that some things are made better by eliminating parts or complexity or features. Think about how kids learn to ride bikes. They need to learn balance and pedaling. Pedaling is quite similar to walking. Your feet go in a circle instead of the elliptical shape that comes with walking or running. Balancing a bike is completely different than balancing on your own two feet. Our first attempt at training kids to balance was training wheels. We took a regular bike and added two more wheels which prevented the bike from leaning. But as anyone who rides a bike knows, they need to lean in order to make turns. In fact, leaning a bike through a corner at speed is one of the great joys of life! Without knowing the physics or describing the process mathematically, we balance the forces of inertia and gravity while allowing the head tube angle, fork rake and front wheel trail of the bike to make magic. Carving a turn on a bike is basically terrestrial flying. So, training wheels are kind of a disaster. They take a regular kid’s bike and add parts to eliminate the need to balance.

Click here for more Thinking For Success essays.

But consider another solution: the balance bike. My son had an early version of the balance bike. As you can see from the photo it was molded plastic in a shape that suggested a motorcycle. At three years old he called it his “mocorcider.” Our driveway had a slight slope and after a very short time he was riding that thing down the concrete like greased lightning. He would kick his legs hard and then pick them up and fly around the neighborhood, perfectly balanced. When he outgrew the thing, we put him on a small regular bike, and he added the pedal motion to his existing balance skills. He began riding almost immediately. The balance bike removed the complexity of pedals and improved the experience by an order of magnitude. Klotz’s point is that we almost always seek to add when we want to improve something. We should consider the possibility that removing or subtracting might be the winning move. Good editors often cut words, sentences or paragraphs to make a piece of writing better. Sometimes what makes a creation great, is what gets left out.

As someone who gets stuff done, you fix, update and improve things all the time. Keep the mocorcider and training wheels in mind. Could you make it better by editing, removing or simplifying? Could subtraction be better than addition?

When something in your world needs to be improved, consider subtraction rather than addition.