Categories: Business, Marketing, People, Productivity

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Einstein. Genius.

In everything you do, consider Einstein’s quote. Purposefully try to make things simple.

Intellectually, simplicity seems to be looked down on. “He was a simple man,” means he was stupid.

But people are crying out for things to be made simple. Take the Google homepage, for example. For years, the search engines were piling things onto their homepage: news, horoscopes, stock prices, weather, etc. Google recognised that people were visiting for one thing: a search engine. They kept their homepage simple, focusing on that one little search box. The result speaks for itself, and the simple format is now copied by almost all the competitors.

Remember that Power = Work/Time. The more you can get done, or the less time it takes to do, the more powerful you become. Keeping things simple gives people that power – what they need in the minimum time.

Yet many people seem to do the opposite of what Einstein suggests. Have you ever sat through a presentation using PowerPoint slides, when the presenter has put hundreds of words on the page? PowerPoint is supposed to be used to summarise the main points, not write a novel.

People make things more complicated for a few reasons:

• They think it makes them look smarter
• The are trying to cover up for their own lack of understanding
• They think more stuff = more valuable
• As long as you don’t understand fully, you are dependent on them as the “guru”

Regardless of these points, making things more complicated makes you look stupid – and ignorant of their needs.

In everything you do, ask yourself, “could this be made any simpler?”