Value Simplicity

I’m an engineer by trade and engineers are experts at making things hard.  If something can be done in 3 steps, we break it down into 500 steps that all rely upon precision execution.  In life, simplicity is rarely something to strive for, but done right, it brings profound success.

My Story:

I was 12 years old at the time of the following story. My parents owned a cabin on Fawn Lake, in Pennsylvania.  One particular weekend, my friend and I decided to go fishing.  We went to the garage and grabbed two steel buckets—and quickly realized they were stuck together.  I don’t know what kind of weird physics were at play, but try as we did, there was no way we could separate these two buckets.

We did everything you would imagine two twelve year old boys might do… we we jumped off each others knees.  We smashed them into the ground, banged them against trees.  — No kidding, no matter what we tried, these two buckets wouldn’t separate.  Just then, my next door neighbor, Bob Mar came up the street.  Bob was old. He used a cane and I remember him spotting us and saying, “Hey boys, want me to separate the two buckets?”  — I  thought to myself, no way this old man could separate these buckets if we couldn’t do it.  Surely, he would fail, right?

Bob took the two buckets from us, and placed them underneath his arm with the bottom of the bucket facing up. He slowly starting rapping his fingers against the bucket almost like you might nervously  do on a table top.  We watched for about 15-20 seconds, when suddenly the two buckets separated.  It taught me a valuable lesson that brute-force rarely solves problems, but rugged simplicity can make solving issues effortless… magical.

How I practice it today:

I look for the simple magic.  What is that magical combination of simplicity that takes an intractable problem and makes it brain-dead simple.  It could be breaking down tough problems, but even with relationships/friendships, I look for simplicity.  — My gift today, avoid  complicating things… look to simplify or find a simpler solution.