How to Make Simplicity a Science

I’ve just finished John Maeda’s book “The Laws of Simplicity”. It’s 100-page book about how to make design, business, technology and life more simple. In reality, the book is a promotional tool for the authors growing consulting business, telling us that simplicity is good but that we need his brilliant and expensive guidance to get it right. It’s like telling a house wife how to cook and take care of her kids.

It’s actually one of the most shamelessly self-promoting and pretentious books I’ve read in years. He is letting everyone know that his message is valid and true since he has a PhD, MBA, knows Negroponte and is a world famous designer (?).

The author actually reminds me of a manager I had a few years ago who in every meeting and interaction with new team members made it clear that she had a MBA. She tried to sneak it in fairly subtle, like “Oh, I remember that we had a similar case at Stanford Business School…” or “My years at Stanford Business School taught me that…”. Luckily I got out of that pathetic mindless management style fairly quickly. But I hear that she is still running the same scheme to invoke respect and authority.

But back to the book, I should not bash it completely eventhough I think that it could have been so much better had the author pulled back his bloated ego a few notches and focused on really explaning how simplicity could be achieved. I do like the SHE (shrink, hide and embody) concept as well as the coexistence of simplicity and complexity.

But the author is making the biggest communication mistake of them all by claiming a superiority to his readers only to satisfy his own ego. We have all been arrogant in some context but for an MIT professor to make that basic mistake is just plain stupidity. Just look at the author picture which depicts him in a Rodin pose (The Thinker) with the hand resting on his cheek and the elbow… It truly shows that anyone can write a book by using basic common sense w/o having to pay $200K for a business school education.

Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham

I learned about Paul Graham when I tried to understand why Silicon Valley happened and why it happened in the wonderful corridor between San Jose and San Francisco in Northern California. A search on Yahoo! Search led me to his blog and to his thoughts about what makes SV unique, why startups is the best place to be if you want to change the world and why nerds aren’t popular in high school.

I quickly realized that I found a mind of my own taste: someone that dares to venture beyond the conventional, politically correct and accepted view on the world. Sure, he can afford it you say, selling Viaweb to Yahoo! in 1998 for $45MM. Well, if you don’t have balls and brains when you are ‘poor’, money is not going to change that.

Anyhow, his writing style, subjects and attitude led me to purchase his latest book: Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age. His style is a combination of Tom Peters and Charles Handy: confident, fluid and clear. I’ve learned that the devil is in the details and a fuzzy explanation is a fuzzy thought. Mr Graham is jumping over these hurdles with ease.

Paul Graham is a true renaissance man which I would define as curious, open-minded, experimental, humble and provocative. Man, if we only had people of his brain power and attitude as teachers in schools today.

The book is filled with a number of essays, most of them can be found on his blog. But the great value of the book – compared to the blog – is it’s portability. It’s the perfect reading during the summer vacation – on the beach, at the coffee shop or at the campfire (out loud if you’d like).

My favorite chapters are: why nerds are unpopular, hackers & painters and how to make wealth. The first made it painfully clear to me why I only was only popular one out of nine years (or two out of twelve); the second reminded me of ‘An Eternal Golden Braid’ and the last why wealth will always beat money hunger.

The Valley needs great thinkers and writers that care about educating people in technology, progress and in solving problems. So instead of putting my copy back into the book shelf when I’ve read it, I’ll hand it to someone than I think needs that extra little encouragement of wonderful insights. This book is to great too collect dust.

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