Simplicity

Wouldn’t it be great if you could write about ’simplicity’ and all you had to say was the word itself and people would ‘get’ it?

OK … likely not that easy.  I am reading The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, by Steven Levy.  I love Levy’s writing, in part because I am technology geek at heart (at least part of me is) and his writing combines technology with social aspect of the time(s) along with plenty of smart insider jabs and commentary that keep things rolling (his book Hackers should be read by anyone who uses a computer).  Enough about Levy.

There is a quote in the book from Steve Jobs who, as you might guess, figures prominently in any description of the evolution of the iPod and it’s cultural icon status (the iPod, not Jobs … er, maybe there isn’t a distinction there after all).  Jobs was discussing his vision of industrial design:

“…when you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem.  And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don’t work.  Then you get into the problem, and you see it’s really complicated.  And then you come up with all these convoluted solutions.  That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for awhile.  But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key, underlying principle of the problem.  And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.”

I can’t tell you how many times in my engineering career things I was working on stalled out in that middle ground of ‘convoluted soltions.’  In some cases, yes, they worked for a while.  In others, they ground to a screeching halt, denied forward motion by the sheer mass of their excess and lacking any potential energy to feed what momentum they started with.

I wrote something on this subject in my first book The Wealth Manifesto, talking about how to run a business, striving for “simplicity on the far side of complexity.”  Jobs was far more eloquent … my statement is, well, more simple.

This does not just apply to business; one of the most important success skills you can learn and apply in all aspects of your life, is to honor this idea and strive to get to the far side.