Why Do Simple Solutions Always Seem Funny?

There's a classic line from Huang Baoqiang in the sitcom iPartment: "Want to know the secret to my success? Read more books, read more newspapers, eat fewer snacks, and get more sleep."

Thinking about it now, the line sticks because Zeng Xiaoxian first said it as a joke, and then Huang Baoqiang actually won by following it to the letter. Underneath the gag is something more serious: people always sneer at simple solutions.

When we face a big problem, a lot of us assume it needs a big method, a Big Idea, to solve it. That assumption is exactly why the audience laughs at Zeng Xiaoxian's advice, and exactly why it's funny that Huang Baoqiang succeeds with it.

But Huang Baoqiang's story is fiction. What happens in real life when someone uses a small method to solve a big problem?

Niklas Luhmann was a famous German sociologist. He started out as a civil servant, and in his spare time he read. After reading, he'd write his thoughts on small index cards and drop them into a box.

He kept up this habit for more than forty years and ended up with roughly 90,000 cards.¹

Later he moved into academia, became a professor at Bielefeld University, and spent thirty years writing his magnum opus, Theory of Society. Over his lifetime he published around 70 books and nearly 400 papers, covering law, economics, art, religion, love, and almost every other field, and the work was consistently excellent.

When someone asked him how he was so productive, he said there was no real secret. He never forced himself to do anything he didn't feel like doing, and when he got stuck on one piece of writing, he switched to another. He owed all of it to that card box. Image: an example of a card box (not Luhmann's own archive) | Kai Schreiber / Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 2.0

What Luhmann was really saying comes down to one thing: just write what you read and what you think on cards, and you'll become a prolific writer.

When people hear that, they react exactly the way we did when Zeng Xiaoxian handed Huang Baoqiang his secret to winning.

Doesn't everybody already know that?

And that's the point. Everybody knows it, yet most people never succeed the way Luhmann and Huang Baoqiang did. That's what makes such a plain, unglamorous method seem funny.

Luhmann's story is the gentle version, though. Here's another one.

Washing your hands is an everyday habit now. People like me who work in healthcare do it constantly.

In the 19th century, an obstetrician named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that mothers died far more often in the ward where doctors delivered babies than in the ward run by midwives.

He suspected that the doctors were coming straight from dissecting corpses to deliver babies, carrying something on their hands.

He made the doctors wash their hands, and the ward's death rate fell from over 10% to around 1 to 2%.

Yet the idea that "washing your hands lowers the death rate" was widely rejected by the medical establishment of the time, because the explanation seemed far too simple.²

Back then, people simply couldn't believe that washing your hands could save a life.

Life is precious and handwashing is cheap, and something that cheap didn't seem worthy of something so precious.

In the same way, people don't think writing index cards is worthy of a towering scholar. They'd rather believe it takes a once-in-a-generation genius. And people don't believe Huang Baoqiang could win a million just by reading more books, reading more newspapers, eating fewer snacks, and getting more sleep, because any of us could do those things.

Lately a whole set of new buzzwords has taken off online in China, including "lean muscle,"³ "drink loads of water," and "sleep big."

I think that's a good thing, because they're about something that matters to every ordinary person.

Out of ten thousand people, some may not want to become writers or slumdog millionaires. But I'd guess almost nobody would turn down healthy habits and a healthy body.

At heart, "drink loads of water" and "sleep big" just mean drinking more water and sleeping more.

The human body is about 60% water. Drinking enough keeps a long list of basic functions running, including regulating body temperature, supporting metabolism, aiding digestion, and keeping your energy up.

Getting enough sleep matters even more. While we sleep, the body repairs itself, consolidates memories, clears waste from the brain, strengthens the immune system, and much more. Almost every change in the body that we can't perceive happens quietly while we sleep.

For people today, just drinking enough water and getting enough sleep already puts you ahead of most.

The "lean muscle" idea asks for even more. To get that kind of body, you need everything above plus regular exercise and a healthy, consistent diet.

So if you can manage lean muscle, loads of water, and big sleep, you already have pretty healthy habits.

I'm convinced buzzwords like these do more good than harm.

Because they point at the most common thing in ordinary life: the stuff we know perfectly well and still don't do.

Just like washing your hands, reading more and sleeping more, or writing what you see and think on cards: does anyone really not know that drinking enough water, sleeping enough, eating a light high-protein diet, and exercising regularly are good for you?

We've been told all of this over and over since childhood. For one reason or another, most of us just don't do it.

Simple doesn't mean easy. Whether it's writing cards or drinking loads of water and sleeping big, the hard part was never coming up with the idea. The hard part is getting people to keep doing it.

So many people online are rushing to chase lean muscle, loads of water, and big sleep. But when the hype dies down, how many will still be living that way? "Drink loads of water, sleep big" is just how a lifestyle shows up on the surface. Real change in a person ultimately takes a change at the level of culture.

The power of a small method usually isn't in the method itself. It's in someone being willing to take it seriously and keep at it.

I'll end with a line from the poet Lu You:

"What you learn from books always stays shallow. To truly understand a thing, you have to do it yourself!"

Footnotes

1. This later became widely known as the Zettelkasten method. Its core isn't collecting notes. It's giving every card a number and linking it to existing cards, so scattered notes grow into a network. ↩

2. Semmelweis never managed to convince his colleagues during his lifetime and later died in a psychiatric asylum. It was decades after his death before the medical world broadly accepted the need for handwashing and disinfection. ↩

3. "Lean muscle" (薄肌) describes a body with low body fat and clearly defined but not bulky muscles. ↩