Simplicity Is the Ultimate Sophistication: What Jobs and Mao Teach Us About Personal Brands

Apple's products weren't what directly got me to read Steve Jobs. Minimalism was.

Fumio Sasaki mentions Jobs many times in Goodbye, Things, and after reading it I got curious about Jobs himself. So after spending 14 hours reading his biography, what did I learn?

I originally wanted to write about what I learned in two parts, minimalism and writing. But in the end I decided against it, because when you discuss the two, they should be closely connected, just as the products Jobs created can't be separated from his minimalism.

After finishing the book, rather than calling Jobs a minimalist, I'd call him a serious creator. Nearly everything he created in his life had something to do with his minimalism. So can I conclude that minimalism has a positive effect on creating?

Minimalism isn't just "less is more." Paring down doesn't mean it isn't complex. Jobs once said: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." He believed that to make something simple, you first have to understand its complexity deeply, then distill the purest solution.

Unlike us today, getting our knowledge from the written word, Jobs's "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" was an essence he distilled from practice, because he used the idea to create many things.

For example, he believed products shouldn't need a manual. Whether it was the iPod's click wheel or the iPhone's single button, these were designs that came down to simplicity yet could carry crucial, complex roles.

In the book, Jony Ive, Jobs's design partner, says: "Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

How do I understand this?

First, I'll grant that Jobs sometimes looked like a minimalist on the surface too. In the book, for example, I saw several photos of him working on the floor of his home, which had very little furniture. These days, an empty room is almost standard issue for modern minimalists. But with Jobs, I'd say that seems hardly worth mentioning.

As a minimalist, who cares whether you've really pared down the things in your room? If I were chatting with Jobs and told him my room was like his, with just a few pieces of tasteful furniture, he wouldn't care at all. He'd just ask me: "So have you ever created something like the iPhone?"

The essence of minimalism is finding, through paring down, what you truly think matters, and then actually doing it. Most of today's modern minimalist movements and practices start with danshari, with getting rid of stuff. In an age of highly industrialized production and rampant consumerism, the world makes countless goods every day and sells them into everyone's homes.

So today there are almost no minimalists who started out with very few things at home. Getting rid of stuff is only the start. Many people find it so satisfying that once they start throwing things out, they can't stop. But that's not really the point. The point is that after people get rid of things, they gradually find what they truly love and think matters.

Jobs is actually a very simple example. What we know for sure is that he was fascinated by electronics as a young man, and that was an era when everything was waiting to be built and the world urgently needed countless creative geniuses. Jobs brought his Zen thinking and minimalism, followed his interests, and created the Macintosh. Later he founded Apple, and then created countless classics: the iPod, iPhone, iPad, iCloud, and more.

You can see from the book that Jobs had a huge passion and urgency for creating what he saw as great things, and that pushed him to pursue perfection in the limited time he had.

That's the power of minimalism. It's a strongly guiding force that leads a person to follow their heart and find what they truly think matters.

And "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" is more like a methodology.

I think this idea has a lot in common with materialist dialectics: seeing through the surface to the essence, and finding the principal contradiction in things.

Among individual writers on social media, there's always been the idea of a brand: building a personal brand through long-term writing.

I think "writing in public over the long term" is essentially a product. Unlike making a physical thing you can touch, this product takes shape bit by bit as practice builds up.

I thought of the simplest example: Mao Zedong Thought. If we treat Mao Zedong Thought as a brand, this becomes easy to understand.

Mao Zedong Thought wasn't born the day Chairman Mao said "seek truth from facts" and "practice is the sole criterion for testing truth." It's the thinking that crystallized after Chairman Mao's long years of investigating, taking part deeply in social practice, thinking, summing up, and practicing again, through one concrete analysis, report, and essay after another.

This also shows that a brand, a body of thought, can't appear out of thin air. Remember, Selected Works of Mao Zedong alone collects hundreds of essays from 1925 to 1957. That's thirty-two years, covering Chairman Mao's youth and middle age. How many thirty-two-year stretches does one life have? Mao Zedong Thought is the best example of great thinking born from long accumulation.

Take "seek truth from facts," a minimal label that later generations distilled after digging deep into Mao Zedong Thought. As writers, shouldn't we think about this: After years of writing, can your readers define you in a single, minimal word?

So I think that besides sticking with writing in public, there's one more thing today's writers need to do: dig into themselves.

Dan Koe's essay that blew up on Twitter a while back, "If You Have Multiple Interests, Do Not Waste the Next 2-3 Years," says: Be yourself. Turn yourself into your customer profile. You are the brand, and your brand is your story.

And I've read something similar in Hecaitou's writing: What a writer truly needs is readers who share their thinking, character, taste, interests, and way of enjoying life. Numbers alone mean nothing. Only well-matched readers have value. That way, the writing can nourish readers, readers' feedback can nourish the writer, and creating can enter a virtuous cycle and keep going.

Both point to one thing: If a writer wants to truly have readers, the first thing is to make sure they're writing themselves.

A self is complicated. Before I read Steve Jobs, I didn't know Jobs often did drugs when he was young, that he was hot-tempered and irritable at work, or that he was somewhat sensitive and moody in life. Next to everything he achieved in the world, his personal image doesn't fit at all.

Yet it's exactly this real Jobs that I deeply admire. If Jobs had followed the script of a perfect entrepreneur, gifted, brilliant, famous young, a lifelong conqueror, I'd probably just call him a rich guy with a few ideas.

Jobs's story gives writers a great example: perfection isn't what matters most. Being real is. In writing, we don't need to build a so-called perfect persona. We need to show our real selves, including the real and imperfect parts.

Jobs wasn't a perfect person, yet the products he created could change the whole world and drive countless people wild. Writing is the same. Don't worry that you're not perfect enough. Worry that you're not real enough, because falseness usually has to be paid for at a heavy price. You just need to make sure that the taste, values, and everything else you express are truly you. Only then can you have real readers.

Only by working on yourself and writing yourself over the long haul can you dig out the deepest, most essential parts of your experiences and thoughts, and present them in countless ways.

Just as Jobs spent all the products of his life spelling out "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," and Chairman Mao spent his whole life spelling out that practice is the sole criterion for testing truth, a very few powerful words can be presented in a thousand different ways and truly affect readers.

That's what Jobs's minimalism teaches writers: we write for our whole lives, but in the end, we're rewriting "ourselves" in countless ways.