When I look at Piet Mondrian's paintings, I see a search for how few elements and colours a painting can contain and still move us. We can feel its beauty without quite knowing how to explain it. Stripping away excess can bring us closer to the core of what makes us love a piece of art.
That is the visual starting point for this website. The same idea runs through life and work: getting closer to what matters by removing what gets in the way.
Life holds more possibilities than any of us could fully account for, yet we still have to choose how to live, what to build and where to put our attention. Learning and investigation help us choose, but they cannot make every possible consequence knowable in advance.
A philosophy gives those choices direction. Mine is simplicity. It asks us to understand what matters, recognise how things relate and give each part a clear purpose. It helps us act with care while leaving room to learn and change course.
what belongs, and how it belongs
Removing excess starts with understanding what needs to remain. What is the purpose? Which parts serve it? How do they work together?
Removing a necessary boundary can make a system harder to understand. Leaving something unsaid can create more confusion than an honest conversation would have done. An explanation or a piece of information may be exactly what brings clarity. The work is to recognise what helps and what gets in the way.
Life brings difficulties of its own. We can add to them through unclear purposes, conflicting expectations or solutions chosen before the problem is understood. Simplifying means examining those additions while keeping what the situation needs.
First-principles reasoning is useful here. Establish the purpose, identify the relevant constraints, and separate what is known from what is assumed. A familiar pattern may offer a good starting point, but we still need to understand why it fits this problem and what would make us reconsider.
clarity that serves the work
In design, the value of simplicity becomes clear when someone has to use what we make.
Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think explains why the difficulty of a choice matters beyond the number of clicks. Several clear decisions can be easier to navigate than a shorter route that leaves someone unsure of what to do.
The designer has to understand the task, choose language that makes sense to the person doing it, and organise information around their needs. If the relationships remain unclear, that person has to work them out. A sparse interface can still make this difficult; a more detailed one can make it easier. Thoughtful design leaves attention available for the task itself.
The same care matters beneath the interface. Clean Code focuses on readable implementation: names, functions and structure that help someone understand what the code does. That understanding makes it easier to reason about behaviour, find mistakes and make useful changes.
Clean Architecture concerns how the larger parts fit together. It separates business rules from mechanisms such as user interfaces, databases and frameworks, with dependencies arranged to protect those rules. Clear responsibilities and boundaries can help a system change without forcing every part to change with it.
Readable code helps us understand the implementation. Clear architecture helps us understand the system. Both support the work of keeping software useful as business needs change. A pattern earns its place through what it helps us do.
Security, reliability, business rules and day-to-day operation may require considerable work. Simplicity means understanding those needs and organising the work around them. Removing a safeguard or hiding an important rule would leave the system less useful, however neat it appeared.
attention, care and responsibility
The question of what matters runs through work, relationships and parenting. Learning, setbacks, rebuilding, and working with people from many different cultures in four or five countries across three continents have given my conviction about simplicity its weight.
At the beginning of the Enchiridion, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus separates what is within our control from what is not. That leads me to ask where I can act, where I may have some influence, and where my attention has stopped helping.
I can care about an outcome and work towards it while accepting that I do not determine it. In a relationship, the other person has their own understanding, choices and concerns. Listening, explaining expectations clearly and responding with care matter even when they do not produce the response I hoped for.
In parenting, I can provide care, guidance and boundaries while giving another person room to make their own choices. People need to be heard and understood. Simplicity helps me pay attention to them, rather than get caught up in how I think everything should unfold.
Knowing what I can usefully do makes it easier to focus. It brings me some peace, even when the situation remains difficult.
a direction to return to
I believe deeply in simplicity, yet even with experience and maturity I sometimes make mistakes that add complications. That is human, and it is acceptable. What matters is recognising them and returning to the principles that give direction.
Acceptance and responsibility belong together. We can understand what happened, put right what needs putting right and forgive ourselves. Dwelling on what we should have known can become another complication. The useful work is to learn and choose what to do next.
This article is a reminder to me as well. When direction becomes unclear, we can ask what matters, what the situation needs and how the parts should relate. Those questions give us somewhere to begin again.