Simplicity Rules

Constraints can make you more creative. When constrained, you consider different possibilities and end up with more and better output. I’ve shared time boxing techniques before, but time is only one kind of constraint. Those in creative industries know this well. Visual artists might choose a restrictive medium. Actors often gather for improvisation, with no storyline determined until it’s selected at random. They narrow their focus, subtracting enough of the possibilities

Austin Kleon writes that all creativity is subtraction in his book Steal Like an Artist:

“Don’t make excuses for not working—make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now. The right constraints can lead to your very best work. My favorite example? Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words, so his editor bet him he couldn’t write a book with only 50 words. Dr. Seuss came back and won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children’s books of all time.”

Kleon has used subtraction—literally—in his own art. He wrote a book and maintains a website with poetry based on newspapers redacted, much like the image above. Using a black Sharpie, he subtracts the words he doesn’t want, uncovering a poem that was always there, unseen.

Similarly, the Laws of Simplicity boil down to subtraction. What can you take away from your work and still have it feel complete? What can you take away from your process that inspires entirely new types of work?

I’m a fan of time-boxing techniques for creating constraints that encourage me to get things done. The POWER HOUR, for example, has been in my arsenal since 2005, though I don’t use it every day. That’s great for personal productivity, but what about when it comes to motivating toward the same end?

Jason Freedman shared the 100 day goals that have kept his company moving without burning out the team:

“Setting deadlines first and then choosing ambitious goals is the key.  The deadline becomes a forcing function that wipes away distractions.  There’s simply no time for extraneous features.  Failed experiments end much earlier.  Hacked together solutions get tested much faster because there’s no time to build the scalable version.”

Now I’m going to try something similar, but with my growing developer relations team at Orchestrate. This week we’ll be on an all-company retreat, where among the outcomes I want is a plan for the next 100 days. Using Freedman’s approach the deadline comes first. Whatever the developer relations team will accomplish during this timeframe will happen by September 9.

Determining what fits into those 100 days is the hard part. And we’ll be using some of those precious days to figure it out, likely walking back and forth on the two simplicity paths until we find the right balance.

As Freedman suggests: be ambitious, but do away with wouldn’t-it-be-cool-ifs. Then we’ll start again.

What are your 100 day goals?

I’m an accidental marketer. Before that I was an accidental journalist. One of my most important life lessons that has served me in both of these fields is to not bury the lead (or lede). It comes from a Nora Ephron book, though I first saw it when I read Made to Stick in 2007:

My high school journalism teacher, whose name is Charles O. Simms, is teaching us to write a lead–the first sentence or paragraph of a newspaper story. He writes the words “Who What Where When Why and How” on the blackboard. Then he dictates a set of facts to us that goes something like this: “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that the faculty of the high school will travel to Sacramento on Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Speaking there will be anthropologist Margaret Mead and Robert Maynard Hutchins, the present of the University of Chicago.” We all sit at our typewriters and write a lead, most of us inverting the set of facts so that they read something like this, “Anthropologist Margaret Mead and University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the faculty Thursday in Sacramento at a colloquium on new teaching methods, the principal of the high school Kenneth L. Peters announced today.” We turn in our leads. We’re very proud. Mr. Simms looks at what we’ve done and then tosses everything into the garbage. He says: “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school Thursday.'”

This clearly had an impact on Ephron. You can see her tell the story and how she realized journalism “is about the point.”

After reading thousands of bad press releases, I realized I wanted to help get to that point. When I joined SendGrid, I preached developer communicators need to share knowledge, not features. It’s not what you’re announcing but what someone can do with it that matters.

Get to the point. Get to what matters. Don’t bury the lead.

I’m not much of a fisherman, but I go out with my friend Steve every couple years. We usually walk along the river, looking for the bends, where the water gets calm. The first couple spots are usually taken by others casting their flies. The next couple of spots Steve often walks right by, because they’ve likely been fished by others too lazy to hike in a little farther.

Even if you don’t fish, this likely makes some sense to you. As a Portlander who likes breakfast, I know going to a less crowded restaurant gives me a greater chance of having a seat for my salmon hash.

Another story of a fisherman takes a less obvious approach to choosing the less popular spots. It’s not about where you get the fish, but what you do with it afterward:

After his first few hauls of fish, John did something quite significant. He bucked an industry trend that had lasted for decades. Instead of doing what all the other fishermen did, which was to sell his fish to a distributor, John went direct to the biggest fish buyers in town: the tourist-packed seafood restaurants on the Cape’s famous Atlantic Seaboard.

After knocking on a few doors, John quickly realized that the restaurant owners were only too pleased to hear from him. After 50 years of being at the mercy of the centralized resellers, John’s service – fresh fish, straight off the boat – was exactly what they’d been waiting for.

I love this story, Fresh Fish, from the eBook Do Ideas. It simply questions an assumption that all other fishermen are making.

What’s the equivalent of the distributor for you in this story? What if that were not as important as you think?

Photo by Mohamed Malik