Crushing complexity
The power of 3
Photo by Johannes Plenio
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Introduction
Do you want to simplify something in your life?
Would you like to have more energy to do better work, spend more time with the people you love and deliver better products to your customers with less stress?
Our lives, our work, our tech, and our world are more complicated, stressful and challenging than ever before.
How can we simplify this complexity?
In this essay, I’ll present a 3-step method to simplify anything.
I’ll start with another question.
Why 3?
There is something very basic about 3.
Religion: In Judaism, we have the 3 Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). Teachings in Hindu texts are often structured in threes, such as the three main paths to spiritual liberation in the Bhagavad Gita: karma yoga (path of action), bhakti yoga (path of devotion), and jnana yoga (path of knowledge
Storytelling: The rule of 3 is a principle in writing and storytelling. It suggests that a trio of events or characters is more effective than other numbers. The 3 Stooges. The 3 Musketeers. This essay is written using the 3x3 method.
Cognition: We prefer patterns; the smallest number of elements required to create a pattern is three. Therefore, we tend to see and remember things more easily in groups of three. Large, medium and small. The good, bad and the ugly.
Science: In mathematics, 3 is the first prime number. In physics, three-dimensional space (length, width, height) is the simplest model that represents our understanding of the physical universe.
Art, Design and Performance: Music is composed of 3 elements: melody, harmony and rhythm. The interaction between the 3 music elements is what makes music interesting, strange, soothing, annoying or inspiring. It’s why many people love jazz and others hate it.
I’ll now give you a recipe to simplify anything.
The simplification process: Select, Steal and Ship
Step 1 Select a problem you want to simplify
Problem-selection is critical. You need a problem you can solve in a budget you can afford. If you have a situation where there are a few issues, you need to ruthlessly triage and select the most important problem of the set.
Leave nuclear fusion and judicial reform for later.
Once you have simplified the first problem, move on to the next.
Let’s take writing essays as an example.
I was not trained as a professional writer.
When I started writing regularly on Twitter, LinkedIn and substack 2 months ago (September, 2023) I was throwing stuff at the wall, and seeing if it stuck. The process was very random, and so were the results.
I wrote a post on LinkedIn on “Why clinical trials fail?” that got 60,000 impressions. I still write posts on X that get 5 impressions.
I felt lost.
I felt like a stranger in a strange land.
I needed to zero in on my problem(s) with writing.
Do I have a problem with form?
Do I have a problem with the writing process?
Maybe I have a problem understanding how I can help readers?
After writing for 2 months on Twitter, I finally faced reality.
I was writing about what interests me and not what helps my readers.
My problem statement is then:
Understand how I can help people who read my work.
After we fix that, we can improve form and process and whatever else needs work.
Step 2 Steal a pattern to solve the problem you selected
There’s a book by Austin Kleon: “Steal like an artist.”
You don’t have to design a pattern from scratch to solve your problem.
You can just steal an existing pattern and use it.
In reality, there are a lot of patterns you can use and modify.
Adapt Patterns to Your Problem.
Like a dress pattern.
It’s up to you to choose a fabric, layout the pattern, cut and sew your own garment together.
I put together 8 patterns for this essay
Physics - The physics pattern has location, speed and acceleration. It’s a good pattern for measuring output of a process, sports activity or anything that involves movement.
Perform - The perform pattern has technique (being proficient on your instrument), listening to the other performers and preparation of the piece you’ll be performing.
Train - The train pattern has plan, execute and improve parameters. It works well for physical training, music practice, yoga, Qigong; any practice that is based on daily repetition and improvement whether physical or spiritual or educational.
Baseball - The baseball pattern has 3 metrics used to evaluate players and teams:
Baseball is a good pattern to simplify complex data into 3 numbers.
- Batting Average (BA)
- Earned Run Average (ERA) for pitchers
- On-base Plus Slugging (OPS) = on-base percentage (OBP) + slugging percentage (SLG) to measure hitting performance.
I recently used Baseball to simplify measuring the performance of drug research. I worked with 2 interns and we mapped drug efficacy, toxicity and safety using baseball-style metrics. So simple to understand.Crash - The crash pattern says that when you fly, put on your oxygen mask before your children if the cabin pressure drops. Crash is good for prioritization.
Patriarchs - The Patriarchs pattern comes from the Kabala where the 3 patriarchs symbolize kindness (Abraham), strength (Isaac) and glory (Jacob). I can see tech startup and NGO founders liking this pattern for a mission statement.
Control - The Control pattern describes control structures in a computer program.
Control can be used to simplify a manual or automated process.
Sequence: The simplest control structure in a program. Instructions are executed one after another from top to bottom.
Decision-Making: This structure allows a program to choose different paths of execution based on certain conditions. The most common structures are if, if-else, and switch statements.
Loop: Looping allows a program to repeat a block of instructions multiple times.Tanya - Tanya is a 3 step design pattern to go from curiosity to sustainable outcome. The Tanya pattern is great for improving or developing a new product. In case you were wondering, the monumental Hasidic work - “The Tanya” was written by Shneur Zalman of Liadi over 200 years before Google and Apple.
Chochma (inquiry) — Use your intellectual curiosity to imagine something, look at the bigger picture and ask people what they really need (not what interests you).Bina (cognition) — Examine your idea in detail.
Daat (recognition) — The crucial step to generating a real, sustainable outcome is recognition. Use your recognition to personalize an idea, understand how it relates to your life experience.
Select and adapt a pattern for your simplification mission. Go wild. Be creative.
Step 3 - Ship a solution using the pattern
After looking at the 8 patterns, I selected the Crash pattern to solve my problem of understanding how I can help people who read my work.
Write first about my own problems and my solutions
(put on my oxygen mask first)
Conclusion
We started this essay by asking a question:
Do you want to simplify something in your life?
Our world is more complex and more challenging than ever before, but a good part of that world is built from 3 basic parts, like diamonds; color, cut and clarity.
In this essay, we presented a 3 step process for simplifying any complex situation.
We call the process - Select, Steal and Ship:
Select a problem you must solve now.
Steal a pattern that fits your problem.
Ship the solution from the pattern for your problem
In my case, I was writing about what interests me and not what helps my readers. I was confused. I used the Crash pattern to find a simple solution:
When I write about something that helped me, I know for sure that I’ve helped 1 person.
Chances are, there are a few more people like me out there.
Life does not have to be complex.
You can take any problem, reduce its dimensions to 3 and start simplifying your life today.
I was very glad to see this! :-)