Simple is not easy: Why it's hard to take simple ideas seriously

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”
— Charlie Munger

Reading this quote took me down a rabbit hole and that led to me asking a lot of questions.

For most of my career as a software engineer and now as a founder, I have been a strong believer of simplicity and it has been the centre of my decision making framework. In that pursuit I end up decomposing ideas to their simplest form. But I have seen people resist seemingly simple ideas quite often, including myself on multiple occasions. That always bothered me and I could never make sense of it, until recently when I had an aha moment and realized what could be the reasons for us to not take simple ideas seriously.

The first thing that struck me was how much courage it actually needs to take simple ideas seriously. But when I went further by asking why it needs courage, I found something even more interesting.

We unknowingly associate complexity with smartness, intelligence, sophistication and genius. This is Complexity Bias . The inversion of this is that simple ideas seem so obvious that we dismiss them immediately. Simple ideas might make us appear naive or unsophisticated. And this doesn’t give us the recognition or validation we long for. Complexity signals intelligence and gets rewarded. This is why it takes courage to adopt simple ideas.

But adopting simple ideas is only the first challenge. You also have to stick to them. How many times have you tried a simple idea, done it for a couple of days, then gotten bored and abandoned it? As humans, we crave novelty. Simplicity feels boring. This is Shiny Object Syndrome . For simple ideas to work, we need consistency, and that’s boring.

I have been a victim of this myself. Early in my career, I used to chase the shiny new technology, be it a language or framework, without thinking deeply about why the current choices didn’t work. And now that I look back, this was probably me chasing novelty.

What does it take to take simple ideas seriously? You need the courage to pick a simple idea which might look unsophisticated, and then stay consistent with it, even when you are bored.

What are some of the simple ideas you have come across but did not take seriously?