Keep It Simple, Stupid
The KISS of Life
Wellington, March 2025
TL;DR: Sophistication isn’t about what you add – it’s about what you dare to remove. That’s why Indiana Jones brought a gun to a sword fight.
Remember that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
The Cairo swordsman is there, all flourish and fanfare, twirling his sabre like he’s auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. Indiana Jones, sweating through his shirt and suffering from questionable couscous, just sighs.
He pulls out his revolver. Bang. Case closed.
That is the “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (KISS) philosophy in action. No roses, no poetry, just a .38 caliber mic drop.
In a world obsessed with adding more – more features, more words, more meetings – Indy’s act of anti-climactic genius is actually the smartest thing you’ll see all day.
From Indy to Da Vinci
Picture this: You’re holding an iPhone in one hand and a 17th-century Japanese tea bowl in the other.
One is a pocket supercomputer; the other is a lump of clay. Yet both are whispering the same secret: Simplicity isn’t simple. It is the magician’s trick that makes complexity disappear.
Steve Jobs didn’t invent sleek design; he pirated it from Leonardo da Vinci’s playbook.
The Renaissance polymath’s Vitruvian Man wasn’t just cool anatomy art. It was a mathematical flex, reducing the chaos of human proportions to clean circles and squares. Fast forward 500 years, and Apple’s designers use those same geometric principles to make you feel like a tech wizard while you’re just clicking colorful candy crush icons.
The twist: Achieving this “effortless” look requires obsessive, agonizing effort.
Apple’s engineers spent years perfecting the MacBook’s unibody hinge – not because they love metalwork, but because true simplicity is a “lazy genius” facade. It’s like those Michelin-star chefs who spend 15 hours sous-viding a carrot so it looks “casually tossed” on your plate.
As Da Vinci said: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
My practical view? Simplicity is the prerequisite for serenity.
And in a noisy world, serenity is the ultimate luxury.
The Art of Elegant Solutions
The relentless march toward simplicity isn’t just for avoiding sword fights or designing gadgets. It is a superpower that transforms entire systems.
Take Norway. In 2015, they slashed their criminal code length to something you’d actually read on a beach. Suddenly, courtroom dramas became shorter and infinitely more efficient. Less legal jargon meant faster justice.
Google crushed Yahoo’s cluttered mess back in the day because they realized that one search bar is mightier than a thousand blinking banners.
IKEA conquered the world with cartoons. They achieved comprehension across language barriers because who needs words when you’ve got stick figures and a hex key?
Even language itself bows to simplicity. Old English was a grammatical obstacle course – like German on steroids – designed by a medieval dungeon master. Modern English came along, ditched the crazy cases, borrowed the cool words from Latin and French, and became the operating system of the world.
The Simplicity Paradox
Now I hear the counterarguments: “Minimalism is boring!”
Tell that to Shakespeare. The man invented over 500 words but knew when a simple “to be or not to be” cut deeper than any thesaurus ramble. Or Einstein, who packed the universe’s complexity into five ink strokes: E=mc².
Simplicity is distillation. It’s why your smartphone has fewer buttons than a 1990s TV remote but infinitely more power.
You start with chaos, simplify it into something elegant, then build new layers of sophistication on top. Rinse and repeat. It’s how we went from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics without losing our minds (mostly).
On Writing Well: “Clarity, brevity, simplicity, humanity.” – William Zinsser
I wrestle with this every time I write. The first draft of any Huliwood piece is a bloated mess – every idea I’ve ever had trying to squeeze into the same room.
The editing process is eviction. Figuring out which ideas earn their square footage and which are just squatting.
The best version of anything I’ve written is always shorter than the first.
The KISS of Life
Sophistication isn’t about what you add. It’s about what you dare to remove.