Welcome to the Action Digest, where excuses vanish quicker than free samples at Costco on a Saturday.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🦈 We learn the laughably simple creative secret behind one of the most famous movie scores of all time.

• 👗 An academy award winning actor describes the moment he was reminded of the simplicity paradox.

• 🌀 A nationally celebrated artist reveals an essential trait for success that’s tough to teach.

P.s., FINAL CALL: Today is your last chance to take advantage of our special holiday promotion—exclusive for Action Digest readers. More info in section #4 below. 🎁

1. Bringing A Great Idea To Life Is An Act Of Epic Difficulty

At the 2012 All Things Digital Conference, Larry Ellison was asked a question about his close friend, Steve Jobs. 

“Why was he so successful?” the moderator asks plainly. 

“There are a lot of good ideas,” Ellison responds. “Translating a good idea into a great product is unbelievably hard. There are so many details. People accuse Steve of stealing the Macintosh from Xerox, you know, with the Alto computer. I was at Xerox park. I used the Alto a lot. Finishing the Alto and turning that into the Macintosh was enormously complicated and there were so many things that had to be done that Xerox had not done. There were a few good ideas in the Xerox machine but Steve would translate good ideas—not always his good ideas—but he would translate good ideas into finished products unlike anyone in our industry. I mean, Henry Ford didn’t invent the car. But he made it cheap, and he made it popular, and he made it accessible to the American people. Steve would translate good ideas into finished, brilliant, products.” 

The insight that Ellison articulates here, that bringing a great idea to life is an act of epic difficulty, explains why Jobs was so famous for preaching the theme of today's edition… 

2. Sometimes The Best Ideas Are The Simplest Ones

When Steven Spielberg was done shooting Jaws, he used a score from another movie to show the composer, John Williams, what kind of vibe he wanted. 

“No, no, no,” Williams pushed back against Spielberg’s suggestion, “it’s all wrong for this. You’ve made a pirate movie with a scary shark. It’s got to be primal. It can’t be esoteric.” 

“Six weeks later,” Spielberg recalls, “he played for me on the piano the main Jaws theme—I expected to hear something weird and melodic, tonal but eerie—perhaps something to suggest the shark underwater. And what he played me instead with two fingers on the lower keys was ‘Dun dun, dun dun, dun, dun, dun...’ At first, I began to laugh—I thought he was putting me on. It seemed too simple. He said, ‘That’s the theme for Jaws!’ I asked him to play it again, and it suddenly seemed right. Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones, and John had found the signature for the whole movie. Without that score, to this day, I believe the film would have been only half as successful.”

Great ideas are often strangled by layers of over-complication added during the process of bringing them to life. When we work to strip things back to their essence, we can uncover the kind of simplicity that carries immense power—the kind that may define an entire movement, brand, style, or generation.

Why then, if simplicity is so desirable, can it feel so complicated to achieve?

3. The Impossibility Of Effortless Simplicity

When three-time academy award winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis was preparing for his final screen performance, he immersed himself in his role in the typical, all-consuming manner that came to define his career. 

While creating his character, Reynolds Woodcock, a celebrated dress designer, Day-Lewis taught himself how to make dresses. Specifically, he remade a Balenciaga sheath dress from scratch. 

"The Balenciaga dress was very simple," Day-Lewis remembers, "or at least it looked very simple until I had to figure out a way to make it, and then realized, my God, this is incredibly complicated. There is nothing more beautiful in all the arts than something that appears simple. And if you try to do any goddamn thing in your life, you know how impossible it is to achieve that effortless simplicity."

The strange paradox of simplicity is that it can be much more difficult to achieve than complexity. This is a useful principle to understand. If we think simplicity is easy then a misleading subconscious association may form in our minds:

Simple is easy → easy is low effort → low effort is low value 

This belief leads us to diminish the value of simplicity and dissuades us from aiming for it. 

Worse, we may come to see any creative struggles we experience as a sign that we’re on the wrong track or even that extra complication is needed to solve our problem. 

When we understand that simplicity is a struggle, it feels somehow more worthy to strive for, and we can better recognize when simplification is the appropriate response when things aren’t working. 

The good news is that there are one or two traits that can help us in our struggle toward simple…

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5. Have The Patience To Explore The Full Range Of Possibilities With What You Already Have

The National Medal of Arts is the highest award given to artists and art patrons by the United States government.

In 2022, the medal was awarded to Ruth Asawa, whose art is dotted all over the city of San Francisco. Asawa is perhaps best known for her wire sculptures (pictured above). The most remarkable feature of Asawa’s sculptures is that they are made with a single piece of wire. 

Asawa discovered a unique calligraphic motion that, when repeated over and over again, makes it possible to create a complex three dimensional structure that can fold in upon itself many times over. It seems baffling that one motion and one piece of wire could generate such seemingly impossible shapes, and yet Asawa insists that her work is simple—provided you add one key ingredient. 

Asawa learned this ingredient at the famous Black Mountain college. “Black mountain really influenced my whole approach,” Asawa reveals, “when Josef Albers gave a class, say in paper, you weren’t talking about going from paper—which is not very important, and next you go into glass, and then next you go to wood, and then finally you graduate to plastics—because that’s sort of the modern material. But [instead] we always went from paper—to paper—to paper—to paper. To make paper do what it hasn’t done yet. So you’re only talking about paper. And then when you’re through with the lesson then you fold it and you put it back in your draw. It’s paper again. What he was talking about was abstracting from the material rather than being concerned with your own design ideas and forcing something into it.” 

As far as her wire sculptures go, “the material is irrelevant,” Asawa insists, “it’s just that that happens to be the material that I use. You take an ordinary material like wire and you give it a new definition. That’s all.” 

But what about the ingenious motion that Asawa pioneered? Well, she says it’s basically just crochet and that “the technique is very simple. It’s just that you’re a person with patience. And you can’t teach that very easily.” 

The key ingredient needed to take advantage of simplicity is patience: the patience to stick with something long enough to discover its untapped potential. The sophistication of the tools you choose is often far less important than the patience you have to explore the full range of possibilities with what you already have. 

• Jackie Chan often devised innovative fight choreography by finding novel uses for everyday objects—making short work of bad guys with everything from an umbrella to a bicycle, to a toilet seat. 

• The secret breakthrough that allowed Banksy to pull off speedy and precise graffiti art? The humble stencil, invented in 1937. 

• And then there’s the $48,000,000 video that Drew Houston had made to get Dropbox’s early wave of users.

You can achieve incredible results by patiently pushing the boundaries of simple tools and techniques. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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