SubscribeOriginally 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.