Simple Is Not Easy

Keep it simple is an oft repeated phrase, and people love to lambaste the complicated. No one sets out to make an overly complicated process. It results from not knowing and feeling rushed. With patience we can craft simple solutions. But the practice to get to simple solutions can be long and winding. Simple is not effortless but it is purposeful.

What we like about simple is that it is efficient, and efficiencies arise from understanding principles. It takes curiosity and time to understand the principles, and the space to work with them. There is a lot of dead ends on the road to understanding how something truly works. After following and fumbling along the contours long enough, we can form a feel of whatever we are studying. But it's frustrating and sometimes we want to rush to the end without taking the time to develop that feeling.

I've certainly felt this desire to rush in many endeavors. In primary school, I was never one to show my work because I thought getting the answer was what I should do. But much is lost by not putting the steps down. For one, it's a communication tool to the teacher. Second, if you don't get the right answer, you can see where you need to pivot.

And forcing to pivot means you have to struggle. You have to rework. The struggle is where the greatest value lies. To undo how we see something can be uncomfortable, especially if it is a long-held belief. But the struggle to bend our mind to a new understanding is where we form new connections. And after some practice, it gets easier and eventually intuitive.

The intuition is the great reward to making it to the other side of struggle. Whether in basic algebra or product development, we want to keep learning and deepening our understanding. Because then we can take charge of the lesson plan and start building on our own.

After we explore and build on our own is when we can optimize. We can see how to do something more simply. And that's the goal: to iterate our learning to reach simple. Hard work but rewarding when you can get it.