“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” - Albert Einstein

Most people, past me included, have picked up the notion that good things have to be difficult. We don’t value what comes easy. Feel like we don’t deserve what we don’t work hard for.

Over the past years, I learned how to write electronic music using only my computer. Countless times, I found myself with a really good idea after just one or two sessions. And then, my complexity  bias kicked in, mixed with a bit of imposter syndrome:

“This can’t be good. You only worked 6 hours on the lead!”

“This is too easy. You need to work-in more intricacy!”

“There are too few plug-ins used, this sounds too dry!”

“You have not written enough music to write anything good!”

So I went back to the track and began complicating things. Weeks later, the arrangement looked like a motherboard from a NASA computer. The effects chain was long and complex (I sometimes could no longer tell what was going on) The original melody was butchered.

I played the track to my dad, who worked in music all his life:

“That’s really intelligent and all, but I don’t think I could dance to that.”

Until this day, my most celebrated track took me three days to write.

Do you make things harder than they have to be?

If you do, you are not alone. As proud owners of a human mind, we all have to deal with the insidious whispers from within. A mind loves complications, challenges, and that which it does not have. Life itself does not care. Your heart beats itself. Breathing is effortless. 

For the mind, life is hard because it’s easy! 

Here is a pattern many people follow (adapted from Robert Fritz):

• Start something you want to do

• Make it harder than it has to be

• Lose interest in doing it

• Convince yourself that it was not what you actually wanted

What’s at the core of making things harder?

I think it’s plain and simple fear. Fear that has many surface-level shapes:

• Fear of not being good enough

• Fear of being called a fraud 

• Fear of not being special enough

• Fear of being criticised by normal people 

And the biggest one:

Fear of simple success and your own power. 

As Marianne Williamson put it:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

Simplicity trumps sophistication

In my twenties, I wanted to get better at dating. I studied from the self-proclaimed seduction masters on the internet. I developed a complex model of how the “process” had to be, that I neatly divided into different phases. For each phase, I had a handful of pre-planned things I could say. I had rehearsed techniques. My model was sophisticated.

And, besides being draining, it also didn’t work.

Reality is always simpler than we make it out to be in our minds. 

What worked in the end was simple human contact.

Ultimately, I think sophistication is a protection from uncomfortable feelings in our bodies. And once we learn to tolerate simple physical sensations, we don’t have to hide behind layers of complexity.

We make things hard because we are secretly afraid of getting what we (think we) want. 
There is more to say on this, but for today, I want to leave it here.