Why Simple Is Smart

Articulating ideas as simply as possible is attractive, not least because getting people to agree with us is attractive. But we have a tendency to overrate ideas that can be shared easily, with the most apparent advantages. By constant simplifying, we may be lulled into abridging our own ideas a little too much, and sooner or later our audience—or ... See more

- complicated ideas take more energy to transmit than simple ones

- for every complex idea there are a large number of stupid copies

- people can often understand things without being able to articulate them, so when a person is helped by a complex meme, they will often reproduce and transmit a simpler variant of the original complex meme

- for some p... See more

The goal is to make the complicated simple — not the other way around. The best ideas are often expressed as simple ideas. They’ll have power because they’ll feel inevitable.