Simplify and Intensify

“Simplify and Intensify” is Kyle’s tag for the discipline of taking simple ideas seriously and refusing to over-complicate. How To Take Smart Notes states the core: “Taking simple ideas seriously” is “a distinguishing feature of extraordinary thinkers,” but “grasping an idea is not the same as understanding it” (the buy-low-sell-high example) — and “if you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself” (John Searle). Simple ideas “can be tied together into consistent theories and build up enormous complexity,” whereas complicated ones cannot; sometimes “the breakthrough… is the discovery of a simple principle behind a seemingly very complicated process.”

The other two sources show the principle as both a strategy and a self-criticism. The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters embody the simplified approach to acquisitions — “we have no master strategy, no corporate planners… Instead, we simply hope that something sensible comes along — and, when it does, we act.” Charlie Munger, in Practical Thought About Practical Thought, turns it on himself: his failure to communicate his 1996 talk was “gross folly as an amateur teacher. I attempted too much” — a failure precisely to simplify and intensify. (Munger’s “First Notion” there is to “simplify problems by deciding big ‘no-brainer’ questions first.”)

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — taking simple ideas seriously as the hallmark of extraordinary thinkers; clarity as the test of understanding.
• Berkshire Hathaway Annual Letters — Buffett’s deliberately un-elaborate, opportunistic acquisition approach.
• Charlie Munger: Practical Thought About Practical Thought? — Munger’s self-diagnosis that he “attempted too much” — a failure to simplify.