Dan Ward

Consultant and Author

Why I Wrote The Simplicity Cycle (circa 2008)

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This blog is not my first attempt at blogging. I sort of lost track, but it’s at least my third or fourth. And way back in 2008, I wrote a blog post explaining why I wrote my books (which were all self-published at the time). Here’s what I said about The Simplicity Cycle:

Frustrated by dealing with engineers who overvalue complexity, I wrote this book to help myself understand design and to counter those complexity advocates. I wanted to explore and express certain truths about design, and by explaining these truths, to be able to understand and apply them. I was also aiming to help establish my reputation as an expert of some kind, and to create something beautiful and elegant.

You know, I think that’s still why I write: to help myself understand things. To explore ideas, to think out loud (on paper), to hold up my ideas to scrutiny – my own and that of my readers. I wrote magazine articles for a military journal. I wrote blog posts. I wrote a manifesto or two, and I wrote short books.

The format and flavor doesn’t matter terribly much. They key was that my writing was primarily experimental and exploratory. It was also public, and I was genuinely trying to a) help my readers explore these same issues and b) helping my readers connect with me and each other, to know they weren’t the only ones working on these issues.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, we read to know we are not alone. I think we write for the same reason.

Free Is The New… something.

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Simplicity Cover circleSo there I was, a self-published author, just waiting for the world to break down my door clamoring for thousands and thousands of copies of my Simplicity Cycle book.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

Some people did buy copies of the self-published version, and I literally made enough in royalties to occasionally buy a pizza. Very occasionally. A small pizza. Without pepperoni. But hey, that’s a bite or two more than I had before, right? Plus I was having fun with it, meeting new people and learning a lot.

I eventually decided to give the digital version of the book away for free. Almost nobody was paying for it anyway, so no great loss of income there. But it was more than an economic decision. It was actually strategic.

The idea to give it away came from an article by John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was titled Selling Wine Without Bottles, and he argued that “Familiarity Has More Value Than Scarcity.” In fact, he wrote “It may often be the case that the best thing you can do to raise the demand for your product is to give it away.”

The principle that an idea’s value increases with familiarity made a lot of sense to me. If lots of people heard about The Simplicity Cycle, and I was the Simplicity Cycle guy, then demand for my services should (theoretically) increase. Accordingly, I set out to make my Simplicity Cycle idea as easy to find and share as possible.

By Dec 2008, the free version had been downloaded more than 1,000 times. By Sept 2009, it was up to 1,400 and in January of 2010 it broke 2,000. Then Lulu broke my heart when they stopped tracking how many times free PDFs got downloaded.

The Lulu Version Format

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mr sillyI loved the Mr. Men / Little Miss books by Roger Hargreaves when my kids were small. The stories were just the perfect blend of simplicity, absurdity, and insight. They were just long enough. The illustrations were engaging, funny, and wonderfully colored.

Plus I really liked the format and the way the books felt in my hands. Open to any page and you’ll find text on one side, with a full-page picture on the other. Naturally I decided that would be the perfect layout for my Simplicity Cycle book.

When I self-published it at Lulu.com, I was able to pick a square print size (just like Mr. Men!), and set out to write a book that walked the reader through the Simplicity Cycle diagram one step, one picture, at a time. In that version, open to any page and you’ll find an image on one side, with explanatory text on the facing side.

In fact, that layout is what I initially proposed to my editor at HarperCollins when I signed the contract. She wisely & correctly suggested a more traditional approach, which really did work better in the long run, but part of me still really likes the concept.

NEXT: Free Books!

The Simplicity Cycle @ Lulu

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Simplicity Cover circleIn 2005, as a Christmas present to my two daughters, I wrote a short fiction/fantasy/adventure novel and self-published it at Lulu.com. The experience of self-publishing was so easy and fun that I wrote 5 more short novels as presents for the next five Christmases. Note that I didn’t say the writing part was easy. Just the publishing.

In the back of my mind, I thought maybe I could write a book for grownups someday too. The funny thing is despite my suspicion that there was more to be said on the topic of the Simplicity Cycle, writing a whole book about it wasn’t my idea. It was Dan Pink who suggested it.

Here’s how that happened. In response to his 2006 book A Whole New Mind , I sent him a link to the Simplicity Cycle Manifesto, version 1.0 (see last week’s post). He was kind enough to write back and he said something that caught me off guard: “One writer to another, you may want to reserve simplicitycycle.com, just in case you decide to write a book someday.”

Huh. I had hoDan Pinknestly not thought about that yet.

I should admit I didn’t actually reserve the domain until 2015 (I have no excuse whatsoever except that I can be stupidly cheap sometimes), but I almost immediately got to work on a longer treatment of the concept. I copied the format from the Mr. Men / Little Miss books, which my kids loved. It took a while, but I eventually came up with a book-like product.  more about that and the format in future posts.

In March of 2015, much to my excitement, I was able to thank Mr. Pink in person when we met at SXSW.

 

ChangeThis Manifesto 1.0

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SC Manifesto1When I was in high school, I wanted to host Saturday Night Live when I grew up. I figured as a juggler, magician and fire eater, I could go out there and do some tricks on TV. What I didn’t realize is that 99% of the people who host SNL are actually plugging their new TV show, movie or album… and the likelihood of me ever being in that situation is pretty low. Um, duh.

In 2006, long after leaving high school, I kinda did the same thing with The Simplicity Cycle. I’d heard about a new website called ChangeThis.com, where people could publish short “manifestos” about creativity, innovation, design, or whatever else they might be interested in. Readers could download them for free, and it sounded like a cool way to share this crazy little Simplicity Cycle idea I’d been working on. Like my high school self, I didn’t notice that most of the manifestos were written by authors with a new book to publicize. Or if I did notice, I didn’t care because while I did not have a book yet, I had an idea. And I wanted to share it.

So I sent in a proposal, it was accepted, and I wrote The Simplicity Cycle Manifesto (version 1.0).

It’s not a bad piece, but it’s not awesome. It’s actually a lot like the first article from 2005 (see previous post). Most of the basic ideas are present, and much of the later nuance is absent. I greatly prefer the updated Manifesto I published in 2015 when the book came out (more on that in a future post). But if you’re interested in what this Simplicity Cycle thing looked like 9 years ago, feel free to download it.

And looking at it now, I see there are plenty of manifestos at ChangeThis that are not plugging a book. It’s a great site, with a ton of fascinating content and new stuff added all the time. So whether you have a book or not, I heartily recommend considering ChangeThis as an outlet for sharing your super cool ideas.

NEXT WEEK: Adventures In Self Publishing!

The Simplicity Cycle Meets The World

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SC Article

I started thinking about simplicity, complexity, goodness, and design in 2002. It took a while before these thoughts were ready to share.

The first public mention of The Simplicity Cycle was in an article for Defense AT&L magazine. It was Nov 2005 and I was now a Major in the Air Force, assigned to the Air Force Research Lab in Rome NY.

Before publishing the article, I hashed through it with my little group of un-indicted co-conspirators. We called ourselves Project Blue Lynx, a nerdy play-on-words for the “blue links” on websites and HTML documents. This handful of creative, energetic, and generous friends helped me think through the layout, test out the concept, and identify a few gaps that needed to be filled.

I don’t recall that the article got much attention right away. I definitely recall thinking there was more to be said about it. I recall feeling like I had more writing to do. While this was just my latest in a long series of articles on a wide variety of topics, and while it didn’t make the same splash some other articles had made, I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen the last of this idea.

How about you? Got an idea kicking around in a notebook somewhere? Have you tried writing an article about it, a short treatment of the concept’s basic elements? There are precisely a kajillion outlets out there (I counted every single one), hungry for new content and ready to share your article with the world. Actually, counting your own blog (super easy to create!), there are a kajillion and one. But the first step is to actually write the article.

NEXT WEEK: The Manifesto!

 

 

2002 – The Saga Begins

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simplicity-cycle-home-middleWhere did the idea for The Simplicity Cycle originally come from? Well, let me tell you.

The year was 2002. I was a young Captain in the Air Force, assigned to an intelligence agency in Washington DC. My duties includes serving as program manager for a little imagery system called BRITE, and sometimes I got to give demos of BRITE to potential users.

One day as I was about to begin a demo for a Navy Lieutenant Commander, she held up her hand and spoke two sentences that blew my mind and changed my life forever. She said:

“I don’t care how good this system is. If it isn’t easy to use, I don’t want it.”

Whoa. That was basically the opposite of what everyone around me was saying (i.e. we don’t care how easy it is to use, as long as it has all the latest cutting edge gadgets & features). If a system or process was hard to use, no problem at all. Just give the users more training. Problem solved. But she was saying ease of use mattered more than performance?

Mind. Blown.

I actually wrote down those two sentences (and yes, BRITE was easy to use, she did like it, and her unit used it quite successfully thankyouverymuch). I continued thinking about what she said over the next few weeks… and months… and years. Her words rang in my ears and wouldn’t let go of my imagination. So I began an informal investigation into the relationship between complexity, ease of use, goodness, and design. I had no idea where it would all lead, but I knew it was a path worth exploring.

I guess the first lesson is to pay attention. Listen to people who are saying the opposite of what everyone else is saying. Listen to the complaints, the pain points, the alternative views. Carry a little notebook and write these things down. And then pick one to investigate. It’s OK if you don’t know where the path ends. Check it out and see what happens. Who knows – you might end up with a book someday (13 years later).

NEXT WEEK: The Simplicity Cycle Meets The World

How I Wrote My Book

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Inspired by AShow Your Workustin Kleon’s brilliant book Show Your Work, I’d like to share the backstory of how my latest book, The Simplicity Cycle, came into being.

It wasn’t always a book, you see. It used to be something else. In fact it was many somethings else, before it matured and evolved into its current form.

Over the next few weeks (months?), I’ll take you behind-the-scenes to see how the Simplicity Cycle idea progressed from a rough concept to a published book… all in the short span of a mere 10 years! See, writing is super easy, and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

I’m planning to post once a week, so check back regularly to catch the next installment!

If you’ve read The Simplicity Cycle already, great and awesome and thank you. Now you get to hear the story-behind-the-story. If you haven’t read it yet, that’s ok too – you don’t need to know what the book is about for the backstory to make sense, but I certainly hope you’ll pick up a copy too!

And if you were part of the process along the way, one of the many, many people who helped bring this thing to life, there’s a good chance you’ll get a shout-out before it’s all over!

More soon!