Sublime

But you don’t often make ideas better by complicating them. At times we fall prey to our own smarts. We trap ourselves with notions that sound good but don’t work in practice. So how do you escape your own intelligence? I follow the advice of Ken Macrorie. Rather than “trying to be lucky with a Great Idea,” he said, “reach for a fact.”

As sportswriter Andy Benoit observes, most geniuses “prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.”