The Elegance of Simplicity

Note: I gave the following speech at Ignite Cincinnati 4

What does the typical college student really want to know about your class? They want to know how to pass your class. “Read your textbook, come to class, study your notes,” is the mantra of 99 percent of college professors yet the average college student stares in disbelief. Why?

Because to the students, It can’t be that simple?!

So that got me thinking, why can’t passing the course be that simple? The typical college students world is a mess of distractions ranging from social obligations to their desks. Their life is not that simple.

To add to this suspension of disbelief is the any college process ranging from applying for financial aid to scheduling an appointment to see your academic advisor, it jus isn’t that simple.

No wonder students cannot believe Leonardo DaVinci who said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” But how do we get students to recognize simplicity and thus sophistication?

Today’s college student is convinced multi-tasking is the ultimate form of sophistication, even if studies show how this is nothing more than excusing attention deficit.

Studies show that the human memory works optimally working with around 4 to 5 things. More than that and our brains become overloaded. The brain protects itself by making us bored.

Being bored we miss another component of simplicity as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end.”

What was it like before multi-tasking took away simplicity? A typical engineer in the early part of the 20th Century tackled his projects with the simple tools of a slide rule and stubby pencil.

The tools may have been simple but the results were quite sophisticated. These simple tools are all that it took to design the SR-71 which could fly 3 times the speed of sound at an altitude of 100,000 feet!

Or using the same simple tools Frank Lloyd Wright was able to design the Waterfall House. A sophisticated concept perfectly balanced with nature.

But how do we get the bored, overly distracted college student to embrace simplicity? Certainly their environment doesn’t encourage simplicity.

Marcus Aurelius said, “Make thyself all simplicity.” So could we suggest to college students to get them to become more simple?

University of Wisconsin psychologist Virginia Berninger tested students in grades 2, 4, and 6, and found that they not only wrote faster by hand than by keyboard — but also generated more ideas when composing essays in longhand. In other research, Berninger shows that the sequential finger movements required to write by hand activate brain regions involved with thought, language, and short-term memory.

Twain kept 40-50 pocket notebooks over four decades of his life. He often began one before embarking on a trip. He filled the notebooks with observations of people he met, thoughts on religion and politics, drawings and sketches of what he saw on his travels, potential plots for books, and even ideas for inventions (he filed 3 patents during his lifetime).

By re-emphasizing handwriting and using notebooks, we help students to remove all of the clutter from information overload. We need to help them embrace simplicity which will allow them to focus more of their attention and creative talents to the matter at hand.

The result will be a greater good for mankind. Instead of focused on themselves, embracing simplicity will help them focus more on the world around them.

By doing so, we may help students achieve Henry David Thoreau’s words “As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”