Simple is Hard, and You Can Too!
Originally published at BostInnovation.com
I grew up believing in the idea that if something didn’t feel like work, then it wasn’t real work — it didn’t mean much, it probably wasn’t useful to anybody.
We New Englanders like hard work. We live rather fast-paced lives, we shovel a heck of a lot of snow, many of us spend years acquiring multiple degrees. Our first questions are often, “Where did you go to school?” and “What do you do?” Operating from this mindset — that nearly all meaningful things in life are necessarily hard — often leads us to believe that complexity is almost always a good thing, too. If a concept is difficult to grasp, then it must worth all that time and energy, right?
Here’s the thing: One of the most important lessons I’ve learned since college — a place where I spent a lot of time working very hard — is that some of the most valuable lessons in life (or business) are very simple. They are simple ideas stated in simple terms, and they require a genuine respect for simplicity in order to be acted upon.
In his post titled “The Betterness Manifesto,” Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque tells investors: “Put your money where your mouth is and support companies that are, yes, profitable, but that profit by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Stop investing in bad, start investing in good.” He reminds all of us to spend our money on “smaller amounts of awesome stuff that’s made with love, ethics, and passion.” His ideas seem so obvious, his words so simple, we wonder why we didn’t write them down ourselves.
Over at OnStartups.com, HubSpot Co-Founder and Angel Investor Dharmesh Shah recently shared 37 quick take-aways from Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s book Rework, including things like, “The perfect time to start something never arrives,” and “It’s the stuff you leave out that matters.” These serve as powerful little wake-up calls reminding us about the big picture.
The Berkana Institute, a Boston- and Spokane-based network of leaders founded by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, states the following as a few of its beliefs and values:
We believe many people in all places are being called to help, to be leaders.
We believe that humans are at a critical choice point — our very survival depends on how we choose to live together now on this planet.
We trust in life’s capacity to self-organize in sustainable, interdependent systems.
Apart from being oddly reassuring, together these feel like a huge call to action in which all of us have valuable roles to play — no matter what level we are on within our organizations.
Jim Womack of Cambridge’s own Lean Enterprise Institute (an organization I had the privilege of working with for a few years) spends a great deal of time talking about the Purpose, Process, People model for understanding lean. If you want to be successful, you must first know your company’s purpose, create and maintain processes to support that purpose, and spend time involving and developing people.
Simple ideas like these, implemented consistently and well, have the power to dramatically change the way we live and work. We come across them often. Perhaps you’ve found yourself able to hold onto them and let them inform the way you work within your startup, within your company, as a manager, or in your everyday life. In my experience, it’s not so easy to hold onto them. It’s much easier to get lost in the day-to-day to-do lists or make things more complicated than they need to be. As we’re hit with more and more information in the 21st century — along with more and more ways to filter and process that information — many of us, especially startupers, move very quickly through our days.
When you find certain ideas valuable, how do you make time to come back to those ideas in order for them to really stick? How do you begin your team meetings? Do you jump right into the work or do you take a moment to think about the purpose of that meeting, of that particular project? Have you made time to slow down and assess your own behavior?
The funny thing is, simple is actually very hard. If you need something hard to work at, try just staying for a moment with deceptively simple ideas and making them work for you.
