beauty – From the desk of Adam Thomas

Simplicity is beautiful.

The idea of a concept distilled into a single idea or single ideas is freeing. It allows people to see something for what it is immediately. Bonus points if it is explainable to someone in laymen terms. If I can take an idea and tell it to a child or someone in a language I barely know, it lets me know that I have really distilled the idea down to a really simple way.

Simplicity is scary.

If there is anything wrong with an idea, simplicity shows it. There is no hiding. When I do this, it could look wrong, and it’s quickly apparent. My ego is on the line with a simple idea. People will already be cautious of something that has very little in the way of documentation or explanation. As counter intuitive as the idea of simplicity is, people feel a lot more comfortable with hearing things with a lot of words. Noise makes people comfortable because it gives plenty of wiggle room. If this goes wrong, there is something in that mess I said that will solve all of this.

Both of these ideas, that simplicity is scary and beautiful, have been true in my experience. I lean towards the first as a default. If I see something that is simple and direct, I think of someone who has done some work on getting rid of noise. I also acknowledge that where I see things as simple and clean, some people see things as unfinished.

One of my goals in life is to bring people from that unfinished side over to the side of simplicity. I recognize that you cannot shut the other side out – they often exist as bosses or other people we have to answer to. When someone learns how to display beauty in its true form, they become indispensable to any rational decision maker and a great decision maker themselves. That is very simple to me.

Beauty and Art with life

It’s amazing when you can see the art of it all. That is all I could think sitting inside of my acting class last night. We were doing an exercise that involved concentration, and it drove people to tears, anger, and frustration. Through that process, everyone’s humanity was on display. There was art in front of us, and it all made sense.

There is magic to it. Life is beautiful through that lens. The beauty requires a lot of cutting. The beauty of that exercise is it happens in a sparse room. There is nothing around that makes you think. The best work seems to happen that way. The best art doesn’t happen with clutter, it only happens when you create signal, and it is strong enough to get to where it has to go. When you have nothing around you, it helps with that.

It made me think of what I was doing in my life. Where can I cut the noise? How I spend my time stood out to me.

While reading the Effective Executive – I realized how much time I waste doing things that don’t matter. “An effective executive knows where his time goes”. One of the first things I know I can do is to take a time audit. I’m scared at what I may find out, but if I just strip down to the essential, I open more room for my art to creep in. I am allowing the beautiful in my life.

For me, there is nothing better than watching something happen, created from nothing concrete, turn into something beautiful. Sometimes it is angry, sad, happy, or joyful but it is all beautiful. The great thing is it is all within us. We all have that power to display that in whatever we choose. To get there we have to use discretion.Our time is important and through that, we can get better with our art, whatever it is. Why else live life if you aren’t making beauty? It is this work – and it is a lot of work – that makes us stand out and be signals to others. That is when the fun begins.