One of the things that plenty of CEOs in Silicon Valley pride themselves on is cutting out extraneous decisions, so they have bandwidth left to focus on the things that really matter. Who has time to match a tie and shirt? By the time to figure out which one to wear, the app economy will have been replaced by the Internet of Everything, and it doesn’t matter how good your color sense is because you’re now going to be picking rags in Bangladesh. Just wear the same turtleneck and jeans every day, and you can avoid catastrophe.
There’s a little magical thinking in this, if you take it too far, but we’re hardly the first people to simply our lives to have more time and attention for things that matter. Look at any monastery and you’ll see a way of life organized around this principle. But you can see it in serious thinkers, too. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon did it, as his daughter Katherine explained in 2004*:
He knew how he liked to spend his time. He believed that “people satisfice because they do not have the wits to maximize” and “information is not the scarce resource; what is scarce is the time for us humans to attend to it.” To maximize time for learning and teaching and talking with students, scholars, family, and friends, he needed to streamline less important activities. Once, early on, he made two decisions: what to eat for breakfast every day, and what to eat for lunch every day, thereby eliminating two daily decisions he would have had to make about something he considered trivial and uninteresting.
He practiced other kinds of minimalism, as David Klahr and Kenneth Kotovsky recount:
Herb lived a simple life. He walked to work from his home a mile from Carnegie Mellon. [J. C. Spender quipped, “His daily one-mile walk to his office, like Imannuel Kant’s, was so regular his neighbors kidded they could set their clocks by it.”— .ed] He hated air conditioning, refused to move his office into the renovated wings of our building, and for years after the dissemination of word-processors, continued to type his manuscripts on a manual typewriter. His home was warm and inviting but not in the least pretentious.
His life was a life of the mind. He inhabited his office for long hours on weekdays and weekends as well. Entering that office was an intellectual adventure. Whatever the topic was, you could be sure that you would engage a mind that was relentlessly seeking to understand some aspect of the world. It was a rare meeting that didn’t involve Herb jumping out of his seat and pulling a book off the shelf to consult about some issue that came up. Following his curiosity was what his life was about – and it led to wondrous places.
In another memorial, Katherine says that “he lived simply:”
one car, one hi-fi, no television. He owned a particular beret, one at a time, the new one purchased in the same shop each time the current one wore out. He and Dorothea lived in the same house for 46 years, never desiring to move to anything fancier. He walked a mile to work and another home each day. In a piece he wrote to himself, he mused that he was sure he held the record as the only person on earth who had ever walked 25,000 miles on Northumberland Street. I am sure he’s right.
*Source: Katherine Simon Frank, “He’s Just My Dad!” in Herbert Alexander Simon, Mie Augier, James G. March, eds., Models of a Man: Essays in Memory of Herbert A. Simon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
