Achieving simplicity often requires complexity
Here is an interesting definition and distinction that can be useful and practical across many areas of life and decision-making: simple vs. complex and easy vs. hard. According to Rich Hickey in his talk, simple and complex are objective, while easy and hard are subjective. Derek Sivers talks about this in this section of his conversation on the Tim Ferris Show.
Simple stems from “one fold/braid” — something is simple when it is not intertwined with other things; it doesn’t have second, third, and nth-order effects. Something is complex when it is entangled with other things — when it does have implications beyond its first level of analysis.
Easy, on the other hand, means “at hand” — near to you, affordable, something you can do because you already did it in the past, or have a particular skill at it. Something that’s already part of your hard drive, metaphorically speaking.
These concepts have practical applications in your life - here are a few of them according to Hickey and my analysis:
- It is necessary to lean into the discomfort that is inherent in learning something new because then it becomes “easy” for us (i.e., at hand), and we can add the new skill into the toolkit allowing us to make complex things simple, which is often a desired outcome.
- Simplicity and complexity are objective. When building something, pay attention to this dichotomy. Bring complexity down to simplicity as much as you can where possible, because this choice makes the whole system more maintainable, understandable by you/other users, and often effective.
- Pay attention to introducing complexity (i.e., complect, entwined, braid, composed of interconnected parts) because when you tie a not many times over, it becomes hard to disentangle it. Complexity often arises from making “easy” decisions in the short term without considering the second, third, and nth-order effects of those decisions. For example, hiring people, staying in your current situation, introducing a new software/system that’s done for you (run by someone else).