Simplicity

I used to believe that the more thorough my thinking, the better my decisions. The more detailed the plan, the higher the odds of success. I was wrong about that for a long time.

Most people are. We dress up complexity as competence. A long memo looks serious. A detailed roadmap looks professional. A product that isn't shipped yet can still be perfect in your head. Complexity feels like progress. Usually it isn't.

Scott Adams makes this point in his writing. He noticed that simple writing is more persuasive than complex writing — not slightly more persuasive, but dramatically so. A clear argument in five sentences moves more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred. Most writers know this and ignore it anyway, because length feels like effort and effort feels like quality. The reader doesn't care.

The same logic runs through everything. Your branding doesn't need to be perfect before you launch. Your roadmap doesn't need fifty pages to be credible. A plan that gets followed beats a better plan that gets revised forever. Waiting for certainty is just another way to stay comfortable, and certainty never arrives anyway.

I used to write fifty-page investment memos. Every risk mapped, every assumption explained, every scenario covered. We were so thorough we often never made the deal. The memo became the reason not to move. I replaced it with a simple scorecard and a short list of red flags. Take bitcoin. Scarce, decentralized, easy to transfer, one clear use case. Significant risks too: quantum computing, volatility, regulatory uncertainty. I know the risks. I decided the long-term upside outweighs them. I could be wrong. But a simple checklist compared against alternatives gave me a cleaner decision than any long memo ever did. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty. It is to be at peace with it and move anyway.

This is what perfectionism actually is, most of the time. It is not a high standard. It is a way to stay in the preparation phase, where failure is not yet possible. Smart people fall into this trap more than most, because they can always find one more risk to map, one more scenario to model, one more reason to wait. The preparation becomes the product. Nothing ships.

There are situations where optimization is the right call. Rockets, surgery, infrastructure. Theses are domains where the cost of failure is catastrophic and variables can be controlled. But most decisions are not those. Most decisions happen in conditions of incomplete information, limited time, and moving targets. In those conditions, a simple plan executed fast generates feedback. Feedback generates improvement. Complexity just generates delay.

The Pareto principle is useful here. In most domains (fitness, nutrition, investing) a small number of rules gets you to the top ten percent. Simple systems make this achievable. The last ten percent requires perfect conditions and enormous effort. For most decisions, that final ten percent is not worth chasing. Start with what gets you most of the way there. See what the world says. Improve what matters later.

Simplicity is what breaks the paralysis. You cannot optimize something that does not exist yet. Start with the simple version, put it into practice, and then improve what actually matters. Perfection comes later, if it needs to come at all.