The chapter opens with the cleanest contrast in the book, and it is a contrast between two operations rather than between two subjects. In the pursuit of learning something is added every day. In the pursuit of the way something is dropped every day.
Neither clause disparages the other activity. Learning genuinely does work by addition, and the sentence describes it accurately. What the chapter claims is that the way is not another subject to be added to the pile but a different procedure altogether, and that the procedure is removal.
The next line pushes the removal to its end. Dropped and dropped again until one reaches doing nothing, and doing nothing, nothing is left undone. That is the formula of chapter thirty-seven, arrived at here by a described process rather than asserted about the way itself. Non-action is presented as a terminus reached by subtraction, which is as close as the book comes to describing a practice with stages.
What is being subtracted is not stated and the chapter is careful about that. It does not say knowledge is dropped, or desires, or possessions, or opinions, though later traditions have supplied all four. The verb is left without an object, which keeps the instruction general.
The chapter then makes an abrupt turn to government, and the turn is the standard one: winning the world is always a matter of not meddling, and one who meddles is not fit to win it. The private discipline and the public policy are given the same form, and the book does this so consistently that the two are hard to separate.