Make Things Simple

When you first encounter simplicity, it feels effortless. The clean interface of a well-designed app, the elegant phrasing of a brilliant idea, the seamless experience of a product that just works—these all seem so natural that it’s easy to forget the enormous effort that went into making them so. Simplicity is deceptive that way. It hides its complexity behind a facade of ease, and in doing so, it obscures the struggle that brought it into being.

To make something simple, you must first confront its complexity. That’s the paradox. Simplicity doesn’t come from avoiding complexity; it comes from wrestling with it until you understand it so thoroughly that you can tame it. This is where many fail. They see complexity as an unavoidable reality or, worse, as a sign of sophistication. Well, that BS. But complexity is often a symptom of laziness—not intellectual laziness, but the laziness of avoiding the hard work of distillation.

Process of distillation. Image credit: ZU_09 / Getty Images

Distillation is painful. It's hard. It requires you to strip away everything nonessential, which means you have to decide what is essential. And deciding is hard. It forces you to prioritize, to make trade-offs, to accept that you can’t have everything. In the process, you’ll discard ideas you love, features you worked hard to build, and possibilities that might have been. But the alternative is worse: a bloated, confusing mess that serves no one well.

The difficulty of simplicity is compounded by the fact that the world resists it. Complexity creeps in at every stage. Users demand more features. Stakeholders push for their priorities. Engineers, designers, and product managers—each with their own perspective—add layers of nuance that, individually, make sense but collectively overwhelm. The result is entropy: the natural tendency of things to become more complex over time.

Fighting this entropy requires discipline. You have to constantly ask, “Does this really need to be here?” and be ruthless in cutting what doesn’t. This is easier said than done. When you’re in the thick of creation, everything feels important. You convince yourself that this one feature, this one sentence, this one detail is crucial. But the more you add, the less clear the whole becomes. Simplicity is not just about what you include; it’s about what you leave out.

The best designers understand this intuitively. They’re not just designers; they’re editors. They know that simplicity is not the absence of complexity but the mastery of it. They’ve learned to live with the discomfort of cutting their favorite parts because they know that simplicity is a gift to the user. And users, whether they realize it or not, always prefer simplicity. They want tools that are easy to use, ideas that are easy to grasp, and experiences that don’t make them think harder than they have to.

This is why simplicity is so valuable. It’s not just a matter of aesthetics or usability; it’s a form of respect. When you make something simple, you’re saying to your audience, “I value your time and attention. I’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to.” And that’s what makes simplicity so hard. It requires you to put the needs of others ahead of your own. It demands humility, patience, and a willingness to endure frustration in the service of clarity.

Simplicity is hard because it’s rare. The world doesn’t naturally move toward simplicity; it moves toward complexity. Making things simple is an act of defiance against this tendency. It’s a deliberate choice to prioritize understanding over cleverness, clarity over completeness, and elegance over expedience. And like all acts of defiance, it’s hard. But it’s also worth it, because simplicity, once achieved, feels like magic. It transforms the complicated into the obvious, the overwhelming into the manageable, and the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Embrace simplicity ✌️!