You Can't Make Mistakes.

My father and I are always harping on the idea that simplicity and elegance go hand in hand. Every time it talks, it seems, we end up talking about something that doesn’t work because it is poorly designed or engineered. Approximately ten times out of ten, this design flaw can be reduced to an over-complexity which removed any elegance from the design.

This perennial theme in our discourse has led me, over the course of my life, to seek out the most simple, elegant solutions to an any problem that I am presented with. It has served me well over the years. The problem though, is that I often come off like I know what I am doing in situations when I might not. We must not forget that my motto—listed at the top of this page—is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t make mistakes. This was apparently the personal credo of my great-grandfather, and then later, it was my father’s as well. I have lived by this credo for years and years and it has served me well. The one disadvantage, as I mentioned, is that if you know a few tricks and some ways around very complex solutions, then you appear as a genius, and people—especially those with or for whom you are working—expect that no matter what the situation, you can figure out a solution.

This is sort of a slippery slope, though, because I also see these things that I don’t understand or know how to do as little challenges, which I will attempt to meet and generally will well exceed even my own expectations. That really makes it look like you know what you are doing.

The problems arise when someone assumes you knowledge about any given situation or problem to be greater than the simply problem solving logic capacity. This is when you are asked to work with someone else.

Give me enough time alone and free reign to do things in the way that I know best, and I will shoot brilliance from my fingers. Any problem, all day long, I can do it. However, ask me to work with someone else, and I am literally only as smart as they are, and that is usually woefully stupid. Now, I’m not saying that I am smarter than everyone else. What I am saying is that there seems to be a universal constant that says that if I am to be paired with someone for the purpose of completing a task, there is an 85% chance that they will be an idiot, a hack, or just a moron.

I do have the distinct fortune of having brilliant friends. Every time I collaborate with someone that I know well, everything is great. But, anytime that I am working with someone I barely know, not a chance. I am not even sure, as I said earlier, that this is a problem of intelligence, but just a problem of not understanding the underlying simplicity of any elegant solution and a general inability to think outside of what they know and understand. I am in no way daunted by things that I don’t understand. Possibly, I thrive when I understand the least.

I am not sure what the solution is, except to be on the lookout for people and situations that wil slow me down and simply turn and take another course in those situations. Beyond that, I guess that I would be totally screwed. Well, here’s to simplicity and elegance in the future. May the complex non-solution be a thing of the past.