Why the Smartest People Live by Simple Rules

Many people including me are inspired by fictional geniuses who can do things impossible for simple people giving them almost infinite control over reality.

I can’t imagine a great developer who wouldn’t love Rami Malek’s character in Mr.Robot. The ultimate hacker who can beat the most powerful organization with the power of his mind — doesn’t that sound attractive? Of course, it does.

…But the cruel reality is that there is no space for lone geniuses in there.

Firstly, the real world contains so many different factors affecting the end result that it is completely impossible to plan everything. It is better to think of it as some level of randomness.

It seems obvious but, still, in many complex situations many smart people start trying to calculate all pluses and minuses to come up with an ideal plan (coming up with a kind of brute-force search).

«Even if I can’t plan everything, multi-factor analyses will give better results than using some rule of thumb» — sounds rational, right?

This mindset is especially common among many developers. It’s not surprising that I myself have been adept at this kind of thinking as well.

And here we come to the second reason why this mindset usually fails on the long-distance…

Even if you don’t play Chess you probably hear something about openings theory and know that all great players use a predefined list of moves in the early stage of the game. Why to do that? The chess board has only 64 rows and often you have only 2–6 reasonable moves from the current position. Significantly less than in real life!

Still, that leads to around 10^120 possible games and makes it impossible to solve chess by brute force with the human brain.

Therefore, even a chess game with the lack of random factors and only a small number of possible actions at each stage is a problem that can’t be solved without using some heuristics (e.g. developing pawns in the early game). And if we take the real world, the situation is even worse…

But more often than not, people underestimate the number of potential scenarios. And cause of that we make errors, blinded by the illusion of our planning ability.

To fight this problem, the smartest people usually tend to think otherwise. They feel that they can’t know all the details. But if their decisions are made for a really strong reason and there are only so many small counter-arguments not to do so, it is probably worth it.

Nassim Taleb perfectly described the underlying principle:

«If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason»
Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The same idea I met while reading about the moment when Steve Jobs was deciding whether or not to sell Pixar to Disney. From the perspective of the prosperity of both companies separately and together, there were a lot of reasons not to do that but only a strong one to continue this deal: in his eyes, Disney was also a great company and he understood that without Pixar Disney will probably stop to exist. He didn’t want the world to lose such a great company.

That’s not the line of thought you can expect from ordinary people, right? Of course, there is a bigger context of this story: Steve Jobs already returned back to Apple and from a rational point of view it was obvious to sell Pixar to some good hands. That’s why the only question that mattered in this story was whether or not Disney was a good hand for that.

Any other factors didn’t play a crucial role in this story, even together.

Many other great people I have the pleasure of working with also tend to this line of thinking. Probably you’ve also met some of them. Especially all the great founders & businessmen use this framework on an intuitive level. But they obviously couldn’t formalize this sort of thinking, couldn’t explain it. That’s why many smart people who can think really fast usually neglect this line of thinking at first.

P.S. By simple rules in this article I mean core principles that guide your decisions on the intuitive level.

P.P.S. The short version of the idea I explain in this article is this:
a) Don’t overestimate your planning abilities
b) Try to find one big “yes” and one big “no” in any decision
c) The big yes and no should be based on your own rules, keep doing them until you find that your own experience is wrong (be prepared to accept this fact at any time in your life)

P.P.P.S. Simple rules you’re going to add to your thinking system should be backed by your own experience. If you’re going just borrow rules from the people around there is a big risk to misinterpret the rule. Remember that most people just don’t think about how to describe their behavior. Thus, if you ask them directly to do that, they will probably give you a misinterpretation.