Thinking simplicity

Simple things look, act, and feel beautiful and natural. However, it is hard to get to the point, in which simplicity rules. Apple is one of the best examples of the success of simplicity. In this text, I will show you how to think to get to this point by thinking differently. Ken Segall´s book Insanely Simply is the main source of this text. It tells about how Apple is using simplicity. I have tried to simplify the most important aspects of thinking simplicity to this text.

Think brutal. Simplicity doesn´t have an on/off switch. You can´t keep things simple if you compromise. Then, you complicate things. Thinking simplicity requires many things. One of the biggest obstacles for you is that your thinking is not brutal enough. You can´t have exceptions and too many rules. You can´t choose the second-best or more complex option to avoid a difficult situation. You have to demand this from your environment. Be brutally honest. It simplifies things. The amount of misunderstandings decreases. You and others don´t have to guess what other people think. You don´t have to be mean, to be honest. Explain your reasons and your honesty is understood. If you do the crappy work, you have to handle honest feedback. Otherwise, simplicity is not for you.

Think small. Groups with fewer members have less complexity. Avoid adding people to a group unless they are essential for the performance. Everybody needs to have a reason to be in the group. It means you too. Don´t offer yourself for a group that doesn´t need you. It is better for them and better for you. Don´t be a tourist. The ultimate decision-maker has to be present whenever the decisions are made. And there has to be only one decision-maker most of the time.

Think minimal. Minimize everything. Do only things you are good at. And do them as well as you can. Keep your options minimal. You will get less confused. Having too many options invites too many liabilities. You will be better understood and more easily remembered when you have created a minimized amount of possibilities to choose from. If you have many messages to deliver for your audience, choose the most important one and get rid of the others. If you have to deliver many messages, find their common theme, and deliver it. Minimizing is hard, but it is worth all the effort. Getting into the essential aspects of the message in a few words is one of the hardest parts of thinking simplicity. Minimize all the extra words and paragraphs. Use images. One image can tell you more than a thousand words.

Think human. Use a human voice. Focus on the benefits you can offer for others and emotions they are likely to feel when you offer them something. Think about why other people do things. Think about the underlying reasons, not the consequences. Have a set of core values and follow them in everything you do and say. Communicate these core values to other people.

Think phrasal. Keep your messages as simple as possible. Forget intelligent and complex words. Keep your sentences simple. Communicate your messages with clarity. Learn this skill and you can express yourself a lot by saying little. If you have to name a product or a service, use simple, short, and natural names and forget the jargon and the model numbers or longer explanations.

Think brevity. Fast is good for simplicity. Forget the irrelevant and go straight to the message. Be direct and forget all formalities. Most things you say are useless. Start fast and lay out the facts as fast as possible. Forget all the extra information. You will look smarter. Let smart people also make their conclusions and let them give their feedback as soon as possible.

Simplicity is a tool for a few people

Simplicity looks easy, but it isn´t. That is why you are in the minority if you are thinking simple. Only a few people can simplify complicated things as far as possible. Going too far is easy too. If you have this ability, it is good for you. It doesn´t mean that simpler ideas are always better. Do not forget about the quality of your ideas. Bad ideas stay bad no matter how much they are simplified. Do not forget this rule. Applying the rules of simplicity works for your advantage only when they bring better results.

-TT

Requirements and commonalities of the mental models

I recommend you to build your own latticework of mental models. It doesn´t matter whether you are talking about a general latticework or a latticework related in your area of expertise, or you are combining them. No matter who you are, you don´t use all the same models than others. You are an individual and you have your own needs and wants. You have to figure out yourself the models that have the greatest importance. Everyone should use most of the models I have introduced in their own general latticework, but not all of them. There are some requirements or commonalities about the models that should be used.

Models are evergreen

All the models have to withstand the test of time. Most of them were true thousands or billions of years ago, like psychological tendencies and compounding. Scientific principles behind them may have been proven in the last few hundred years, but people have known their existence much longer. When you are building your latticework of mental models, you should focus on the models that haven´t changed for a long time. Basic principles of all the major disciplines like mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry are a good starting point. These principles have been true for a long time and will be true in the future.

You have to understand that some of the models I have introduced and some models you think are important can change in the future. The biggest changes come from artificial intelligence. Many models of human behavior will become less useful. When you will have a smaller role in decision making, many psychological tendencies have smaller influence on your behavior. To be honest, I have no idea if or when this happens. It is beyond my expertise.

Models are versatile

Single purpose for a single model is not enough. All your models have to have many useful applications and have various uses. For example, inertia can be seen as a habit, status quo preservation, or it can be used for forecasting a movement of objects, etc. All the models you have in your latticework should have many purposes. Instead of looking out for a model that is a solution for a single problem, it should be possible to use it as a solution or part of it for many problems. There are thousands or even millions of different models. By using versatile models, you can minimize the amount of models you need to understand. Deep understanding of a smaller amount of models is more important than knowing many single models.

Models have to be interconnected with many other models. For example, when inertia, the path of least resistance, critical mass, and some other models are combined, you understand habits and their formation better than you would undertand by thinking only about inertia. Most things in the world are interconnected somehow. You limit your understanding by using models with no interconnections with other models. With this understanding you understand all disciplines better. For example, by using models only from economics, you don´t understand economics as well as by understanding how they are connected with models from other disciplines like psychology, or even physics.

Models are simple

You have to make your models in the latticework as simple as possible, but no more simpler. The definition of the model has to be simple. It cannot be many sentences long. Most adults have to understand it by reading it once. Even though simple models are important, deep understanding of them can take years. Simple models and how they can be used are hard to understand. Most people cannot understand complex models. And less people understand how many simple models are interconnected. Understanding interconnections of many complex models is close to impossible. This is the reason why all the models have to be simple. Basic principles in the most important scientific disciplines are a starting point. They are the most profound and simplest models. By understanding them, you can understand more about the world and people in it than most of the other people. The amount of models you have to understand becomes smaller. And you have a restricted bandwith. You cannot understand hundreds of profound models. You can understand only tens of them.

These are the most important requirements or commonalities of the most useful mental models. By using them, you can create your latticework. You can have other requirements too. These are just mine.

-TT

How social contagions reach critical mass part 2 Sticky messages

Before reading this text I recommend you to read part 1 of how social contagions reach critical mass. 

You may have heard this story before: A friend of a friend was abroad. He went to a hotel bar to have a drink. He met a nice girl, who wanted to talk to him. The next thing he remembers, is that he woke up in a bathtub full of ice. He started to look around and found a note next to him, which said: ”Do not move and call this number!” Next to the note he found a mobile phone and he called to the emergency room. Pretty calm voice answered and asked ”Is there a tube in your lower back attached to you? He touched it with his hand and noticed it and he said yes to the operator. The next thing he heard, was calm words: ”Do not move, just tell us in which hotel you are and we will help you, you are a victim of the kidney heist.”

Composing a sticky message is not easy. The first story is an urban legend, which is a sticky message too. Sticky messages have many similarities and this post is about composing one. Everybody has probably heard some version about this story from somebody they know. Sticky messages are understandable, remembered and they have long-lasting consequences, which can change behavior.

Sticky messages have some certain characteristics, they are

1. Simple
2. Unexpected
3. Concrete
4. Credible
5. Emotional
6. They are explained through stories

Simple messages are squeezed into the core idea. They are easily understandable. Finding the core means squeezing the message into its most critical essence. You have to find the most important idea from your message and forget everything else, which seem to be critical, but do not belong to the core idea. To form a sticky message, you have to know how much of the message you can lose without killing the core idea. Simple messages are compact and the core idea is easily understood. You should use sentences instead of paragraphs, short sentences instead of long ones, and you should use easy words instead of hard ones. The idea gets stickier, when you can reduce the amount of information.

Unexpected messages contain surprise(s) at some point. You need a surprise to get people´s attention. Surprise means breaking the pattern the audience is used to hear. The surprise makes you give more attention to the idea. The extra attention then moves unexpected ideas into your memory easier. You have to fix the broken guessing machine, which is in your brains. The goal is to make people care about something and then tell people what they want to know.

Concrete message is examinable through your senses. For example, you can show photos or some other live media to make people sense the idea. Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Concreteness creates a shared understanding. Abstraction moves you into other way. Concrete language is used to help beginners to understand some complex ideas. It is a lot easier to use complex and abstract language and professional jargon instead of keeping things concrete. The problem is, without concreteness of the message it may be too hard to be understood.

Credible messages need details. Yoy need to define details, which can symbolize and support the core idea. Sometimes you can use statistics to enhance the credibility of the idea, but they need to be related to the idea you want to share. You can also use authority or antiauthority to get more credibility to your idea. For example, some success stories are good, when you want to show our solutions to problems are working.

Emotional messages work better than trying to give a reason for something. Most people believe in telling many reasons to do something, but most often message fails. By trying to make people care, you inspire people to act. You should do this by associating people with feelings they already have. Trying to associate the message with identity may help you get your message through. By doing this, you associate the message into people´s self-interest. People most often ask ”What´s in it for me?”.

Story-telling is a best way to make people take action. Stories provide mental simulation and inspiration to people who are listening. Mental simulation works, because you cannot imagine events without evoking modules of the brain, in which the same physical activities are evoked. These mental simulations help you manage your emotions. Stories provide content that is missing from abstract ideas. They are almost always concrete, emotional and they have unexpected elements. When you can tell a good story with only the core of the idea, you get almost every component of the sticky message. This way you can get your message through in a best way and it sticks longer in the mind of your audience.

You should use a checklist of these 6 things before sending the message. You don´t have to have all the components, but some of them are needed. If you can get your core idea through with the other components, your message should be sticky. Just try it and see what happens.

-TT

Simplicity

Simplicity

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

• Steve Jobs

Definition

It is basically impossible to find one definition for simplicity. Most of the English dictionaries offer different definitions. You need to define it many ways. First, simplicity can mean something that has no complicated parts or complicated details. Second, the quality or condition of being easy to understand or do. Third, it can be defined: The quality or state of consisting as few parts as possible.

Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more simpler.

People are the most smartest living things in this planet and also the most complex ones. The world is so complicated that even the smartest experts have trouble in understanding their own discipline. Complexity has created enormous amounts of waste to everyday life. To reduce the waste you have to simplify your life. Simplifying should not go too far, because some of the complexity is necessary to be as effective as possible. Increasing complexity has a critical mass, in which the cost of added complexity exceeds the usefulness of extra complexity. Everybody needs to find this point in what they want to achieve.

Oversimplifying is not going to give us the results you want. You cannot be depended on one thing only, not in any part of your life. Keeping things too simple, believing there is only one solution or factor that has an effect on any bigger thing is a major cause for many failures. You can see lots of experts with excellent reputations believing in a single factor in big things like growing multibillion dollar businesses, for example, technological competitive advantage as an only source for growing Apple.

You should simplify with using simple rules and systems. You can add simple rules into your life, like do not eat after 10 pm. There can be rules for anything in life. It is pretty easy to invent the rules, but it is harder to apply them all the time. Therefore, you need systems like habits, skills, or some decision making systems, which make complex things simpler. Systems have normally less waste. You have to remember that systems are created from different parts. The amount of parts should always be minimal for the reason the system which is created and these parts should also be as simple as possible.

Multitasking: doing a shittier job, and being happier about it

People live in societies where the myth of doing many things at once is a sign of success. This is a wrong assumption and has no scientific base. Brains can do only one task at a time. What really happens is that when you are ”multitasking” you are rapidly changing from one task to another. Every time you do it, there is a cost. You get less efficient every time You change your task. What really happens in your brain is that multitasking creates a dopamine addiction feedback loop. This loop rewards your brain for losing focus and keeps it looking for external stimulation. Because of this loop, you get empty rewards from getting hundreds of small tasks done. The opportunity for multitasking is enough to harm your cognitive performance. What really happens is that you get more satisfaction for doing a shittier job.

You have also some metabolical costs from multitasking. Changing tasks makes your brain to burn up oxygenated glucose which is the same fuel for keeping your focus on tasks. Fast and continual changing from one task to another causes the brain burn the glucose so fast that you feel disoriented and exhausted after a short while. You have used all the nutrients in our brain. Your cognitive and physical performances suffer from this. You use a lot less energy, when you are focusing on one task at a time. All the changes in your tasks are also decisions. In multitasking, you don´t even recognize it. Decisions deplete your neural and physical resources too. Little decisions appear to use as much of your neural resources as the big decisions. You should arrange our environments in a way that your possibilities for distractions are as small as possible, especially, when you are doing the most important tasks of the day.

Information overload comes with too many parameters

There is always a maximum amount of information you can process within a period of time. Increasing the amount of information over this limit, you cannot function in the most efficient way. Human brains evolved in an environment, in which the amount of information was minimal compared to the World you live in.The capability of your brains is limited. The maximal amount of parameters, which can be either attributes of choice or the number of alternatives, is ten. After that limit, the quality of the decisions gets weaker. There is not so much difference after ten paramaters have been reached. It doesn´t really matter if there are over ten or even twenty different parameters or alternatives. There are many ways to reduce this number. For example, you can apply systems, in which the amount of alternatives have been reduced before, we even start making a decision.

All this is just a tip of an iceberg about the power of simplicity. It is hard to simplify your life and all the other related actions to an optimal level of simplicity. Everyone would do it, if it were simple, but it is easier to have too much simplicity or complexity. All the masters of their fields of expertise are able to get close to optimal level. Most people cannot do it and they live their lives with lots of waste, whether it means about using their time or efforts. Reaching an optimal level of simplicity should be goal to all of us. It is a skill you should try to learn.

Sources:

Poor Charlies Almanack, Peter D. Kaufmann, Charlie T. Munger
Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz
The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin
Insanely Simple, Ken Segall

-TT