One of the great gifts of vacation, time away or time apart is that it brings you back to the what’s really important. Step out of the multiple projects and commitments and just stand back and you begin to get back to the things that matter most and remember that those things are pretty simple.
It is one of the gifts of our family cottage. It used to be more rustic than it is today. It has entered the age with Wi-Fi and a Nintendo Wii. Even so, it is an hour from the city, 6 miles off the nearest paved road, back in the bush. There life boils down to family, friends, nature, good food and drink. The essentials. It is a beautifully simple rhythm of life.
As you look around, you are reminded of that great wisdom of the ages: keep it simple, stupid. Keep your attention on what matters, the basics, because the basics will not fail you.
This saying and the acronym, KISS, is said to have been coined by a man named Clarence Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skunk Works, the creators of sophisticated spy planes.
The story goes that Johnson once handed a team of design engineers (the people that make the planes) a handful of tools, with the challenge that any jet aircraft they were designing must be repairable by an average mechanic in the field under combat conditions with only these limited tools. And so, ‘stupid’ here doesn’t refer to his engineers, but to the relationship between the way things break and the sophistication available to fix them.
In short: the design of things and, thus, the means of their repair must be simple enough for the average person, here – average engineer – to fix. Continue reading
