Simplicity

Simplicity sounds like an easy goal, but it almost never is. Most people say they want things to be simple, but what they usually end up with is simplistic. Real simplicity doesn’t come from doing less work—it comes from knowing what really matters and cutting the rest. That’s the hard part. ​ You can see this when you’re working on code you care about. At first it’s a mess, because you don’t fully understand the problem yet. As you keep working, you start to see which pieces actually do the job and which ones are just there because you were unsure. You rewrite, merge, and delete. The final version looks obvious, but that obviousness is the whole achievement. Things look simple only after you’ve done the hard thinking.

There’s courage in that process. You have to remove parts you once argued for, or spent time building. You have to admit that some of your earlier ideas weren’t actually helping. Letting go of those pieces feels like loss at first, but it’s what makes the whole thing cleaner and easier to understand. Simplicity is often just what’s left after you stop hanging on to what you no longer need. ​ You can feel when something has been reduced to the right shape. Nothing extra, nothing missing. It’s not about looking neat or minimal; it’s about being clear. The best version of anything usually looks smaller than you expect.

A good test of simplicity is whether the thing can explain itself. You don’t have to give a long speech about why it’s right. It just works, and other people can see why with very little help. When you reach that point, the result feels natural, as if it was always there waiting to be found. That’s the reward of simplicity: the sense that you’ve uncovered something true by stripping everything else away.