How to do x in one easy step!

I wrote about this pet peeve of mine on my personal blog. Deep diving and reading more and more has brought this to light again recently. I think genius comes from making something complicated incredibly easy (to understand, use, follow, etc). That’s rare though.

I find a LOT of books, blog posts, etc. guilty of oversimplifying the premise and complicating the details. I’m not naive. I work in marketing. So if you say up front something is hard, then well you might not sell anything.

My pet peeve is when an idea is presented as one or a few easy steps, when those steps have sub-steps and those sub-steps have further sub-steps. What it ends up as is a convoluted mess. And oftentimes contradictions flow out of them.

While I know nothing can never be THAT simple, sometimes concise is the way to go. I imagine book authors have page minimums they need to meet, blog posters have posts per day goals they need to meet, etc. KISS is the way to go. Keep it simple stupid.

Funny enough in this entire quest of mine so far I’ve discovered mind mapping. I’ll get into it in more detail in another post (I’ve been saying that a lot, I know). Perhaps these multiple step, sub step, blah, blah roadmaps can be put in mind map form for better visualization??? I’ve been tinkering with http://xmind.net/.