In 1996, a physics professor at New York University named Alan Sokal successfully published a paper in Social Text, a high-profile academic journal of cultural studies.

His paper, titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, suggested that reality is not objective, but is instead socially constructed, and is influenced by political and cultural forces.

Sounds good so far?

Here’s the thing, though. Sokal was really talking out of his ass.

Underneath the paper’s serious academic tone, Sokal deliberately used highfalutin and meaningless jargon, and mixed real concepts with nonsensical ones. The whole paper was him talking without actually saying anything.

Sokal’s point was to criticize the lack of rigor in academia. He wanted to prove that even a prestigious journal such as Social Text cared more about a paper sounding smart and complex, rather than having actual value or contribution to the field. And he duped them, hard.

Sokal’s prank, which we now know today as the Sokal Affair, sent shockwaves in academia. But it also reveals a fundamental human truth, in that our instinct is to equate complexity with value.

We tend to think that because something is difficult to perform or comprehend, it must be worth a lot. But that isn’t always true. 

Counter-intuitively, real value can often be found in simplicity.

Simplicity may seem, well, simple. But the process of achieving simplicity is truly not. It often takes good, hard thinking to make something simple. It requires you to ruthlessly whittle away the inessentials, until you get to the very core of whatever you’re doing.

Steve Jobs, who pioneered many of Apple’s most intuitive products, said, “It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

Arguably, much of Apple’s success during Jobs’s time can be traced back to his ability to say “no”. He had to say no to open operating systems. No to unnecessary features in their products. No to putting out many products instead of focusing on just a few high quality ones.

I struggle with this in my writing as well, especially with longer articles. The problem, as it so often happens, is that I would have so much information, and so many points to talk about, to the extent that I couldn’t even say for sure what the article is about anymore.

Whenever this situation happens, it’s always extremely helpful for me to follow Steinbeck’s writing strategy (which he, in turn, learned from his professor, Edith Mirrielees), which is to summarize your entire piece of writing into just one sentence.

The takeaway here is that if you can’t confidently say in just a few words what your piece of writing is about, then you still have a lot of fat left in your writing to trim off. 

If you have too many things to say, you’d might as well have nothing to say.

I’d often remind myself that my article can only be about one thing, and not a million. And once I find the core idea, I would have to “kill my darlings”, as Stephen King would say. I would have to savagely delete everything else I have written, and every other information I have collected, that don’t gel well with that core idea.

So, the next time you’re faced with a complex project, it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself, what is actually the core idea here? What would this project look like if it were simple?

Keep on asking, and keep on searching for the answers, until you find that nothing in your art is lacking, and nothing is extra.