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Published: April 10th 2010
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I am at a beautiful beach town at the southeast part of Madagascar. It feels like paradise to surf and have the mountains as the landscape around me. I've been here for 10 day already and feel like part of the community. I've been surfing, fishing and playing drums with the locals. I'm living such a simple life right now and I wake up as a happy man every day.
Experiencing Simplicity Two of the earliest advices I remember as a kid were: 'Aim it straight when you're using the toilet' and K.I.S.S. which stood for 'Keep It Simple, Stupid'. Two wise advices and yet, unfortunately, I still fail to follow either of them. Keeping it simple is not as easy as one would think. My mind always has this urge to over complicate little things instead of seeing things as they are.
I usually turn something very simple into something very complicated. All my life, I've been trying to figure out why things get so complicated. Until recently, I learned that matters become very complicated once I see things in the intellectual and emotional level. I take something very simple and start to use my brain
to over analyze the situation. 'Oh, that guy is talking to my hot girlfriend. I wonder what he's going to do." Then my emotions come out and I feel jealousy or insecurity. I added a whole bunch of opinions and emotions to the situation which was actually quite simple: They're just talking.
But if the intellectual and emotional point of view create complications, then what view makes it simple? During my Vipassana meditation retreat, the main thing they taught was to see things in the 'experiential level'. That to truly understand something, I have to experience it for myself. If I have not experienced it myself then I am ignorant. If I'm ignorant and I give my intellectual advice on something that I don't really know, then I've complicated things. Therefore, I should truly understand the situation by experience or I should just leave it alone. That simple. Just think about how complicated it would be for a dad to talk about periods with the daughter. It'd be an akward conversation because he's trying to explain it on the intellectual level. On the other hand, a mother speaking to the daughter about the menstrual cycle is simple because she
understands it on the experiential level. To really simplify things, we need to go through them in the experiential level. Just ask Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs is the eptiomy of simplicity. All the products and services he's ever made were simple to use. The reason it's so simple to use is because Steve Jobs test-drives his products more than anyone else. He always wants 4 protoypes to choose from and then tries them out. Most of the time, he doesn't like any of them so he trashes them. He spends hundreds of millions on those prototypes whereas many other CEO's would've preferred to use a cost effective software that can computerize the prototype. But that's why he's so succcessful at making things simple, he chooses to go through them in the experiential level. He wanted to experience what it felt like as a customer to actually hold an iPhone. When he experiences it first-hand, he is able to see how complicated he made some of the functions. He experiences some difficulty and then knows how to simplify it for the next round of prototypes. Other companies who use computerized prototypes can only make adjustments on the intellectual level because
Sunset
right over sea they aren't experiencing it first-hand. They
think they know what the problem is so they try and fix it, but they actually make it more complicated for the user. See LG and Motorola phones. He also never listens to focus groups or market researches because "it's really hard to design products by focus group because people don't know what they want until you show it to them". If he listened to the focus group, the iPhone would not be as simple as it is now because everyone would be giving him advice on the intellectual level. He chose to listen to his inner-concious where it was telling him to use his experience to create something simple.The result: he made iPhone so simple that it's the first revolutionary gadget that came WITHOUT a manual instruction. It's so simple to use.
What people don't know is that Steve Jobs is a very spiritual man who went on a journey to India to find himself after he decided to drop out of college. He wanted to stop reading about spirituality and experience it instead. Kind of like what I'm doing myself. Reading books and philosophies always confused me because I was trying
to understand spirituality on the intellectual level. "What do you mean there's no 'self'?" or "What does inner-peace have to do with observing the breath?" But now that I'm actually out here and taking time to experience it for myself, these philosophies feel a lot more simple to understand.
As I'm going through all this, I'm starting to realize how simple life can really be. It's just that we complicate everything by tying in our emotions and opinions. We're thinking on the intellectual level and acting out in our emotional level. But if we understand something through the experiential level, then we're not basing things on opinions anymore but on hard facts. Somebody who experiences the truth understands the situation more than somebody who researches it. That's why we look up to wise men and not smart men, because a wise man understands through experience. All these wise men have one spiritual quality to them: they're simple. They live a simple life. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Buddha, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Dalai Lama, Ralph Waldo Emerson. If all these men have experienced the simple life and are telling us that it's a key to success, wouldn't it be a good idea for me to listen to their wise words?
So here I am, listening to the words of the wise and learning how to live a simple life. In Africa with just my backpack. I'm experiencing a different type of daily life with no cell phone, internet, TV, AC, car or hot water. With less attention to these things, I feel more in touch with the nature around me. I take notice of how happy the locals are even though they have little money. I'm paying more attention to the intangibles and less of the materialism. I think I'm a happier man now. Actually, no, I feel like a happier man now because I feel like my life is more simple. My hope is that I won't go through life determined to add more things but to go through the journey with just enough baggage. Simplicity has become a part of my character now and so everything that I do feels a lot more simple. I'm experiencing a simple life and I love it. When the day finally comes and I have to give my children only one advice, it'd be: You can aim it however you want at the toilet, but just Keep It Simple, Stupid.
-Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
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Mama Jenny
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simple life at home town
Is simple life at yoru home twon Taiwan possible? i start to miss you too much and hope that you can enjoy simple liefe just at home! This is from exeperience level, not from intellectural level, right? Love you. Mom