“My word would be ‘simple’.”
Late January in an off-grid cabin on the edge of an inlet in the middle of the woods on a peninsula on the Sunshine Coast. Far away from anywhere, not least the sunshine, on a dark, rainy coastal winter night. Sipping tea and whiskey with a small group of dear friends, sharing stories, posing questions for the group to ponder.
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“Describe yourself in one word.”
Another evening, another table set for connection among another small group of dear friends. Different season, different nearby body of water, years previous.
It was the last question T. had been asked at the end of a gruelling set of interviews that had interrogated every dimension of his experience, character, and vision for the future in the role.
He looked at each of us around the table in turn: “How would you answer?”
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“The true test,” T. said later, “was much less about what the word was. It was about whether you could respond as requested. Could you say just a single word; not follow up; no add-ons, embellishments, or explanations why you’d picked the word. Could you look across the table at the person you most wanted to impress in that moment, your potential future boss, and just answer a question simply.”
What an exercise.
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I liked it so much that I carried it around with me, asking other groups as I traveled. Not for the same purposes as T’s interviewer; in fact, the opposite: I loved the process of teasing out from friends a response to this question that’s equal parts clear and complicated. At least as much, I loved learning about why they’d arrived at their word.
And then came E.’s response: Simple. And I immediately rejected it. No curious follow-ups, even though it came from him so cleanly, so quickly, so certainly. Why?
E. is one of the best men I know. I could not hold him in higher esteem. He is an exemplar of competence, kindness, and patience. But “simple”?
No.
He didn’t ask for it, sure as hell doesn’t require it of me, but I quietly came to E.’s defence as the rain attacked the metal roof of the cabin. I didn’t overtly challenge his self-definition; but I did probe, trying to be his publicist in front of an appreciative audience, suggesting he was more than “simple,” nudging a reconsideration of rhetoric that better described his bigger gifts.
No thanks.
Walking through seasons back to that cabin , I know what I’d heard that winter night: simple as a polite word for unsophisticated. Less than.
Somewhere along the way I’d absorbed an unacknowledged ranking in which complexity is the mark of depth, something you earn, and simplicity is what’s left if you haven’t.
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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master, that’s all.”
~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
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E. knew what he meant. I was the one who needed defining.
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Jimmy Chin: I’ve known Yvon [Chouinard, founder of Patagonia] for 20, maybe 25 years now. And I’m always trying to spend time with him. One of the things he says in his chapter [of Jimmy’s recently released book, Rules to Live By] is that it’s so easy to complicate your life and so difficult to simplify it. […] And he’s a billionaire, right? […] And he’s like, I don’t need more money. I live a simple life and my children are the same. They live simple lives and they live fulfilled lives. More money isn’t going to change that for me or for them.
So we’re going to give [the company] away. We’re going to give it to a foundation that the interest in keeping the business profitable is in order to keep it alive, in order to continue funding environmental causes. […]
A lot of the people I talk to in the book are later in their career and have had extraordinary lives, extraordinary successes. And I was really curious when I talked to them to ask: What did success look like for you when you started? And what does success mean to you now? And there’s a fairly common thread for these people. People like Kelly Slater, Ridley Scott.
Jonathan Fields: What was the pattern that you were seeing?
Jimmy Chin: Well, it’s what Yvon talked about. It’s simplifying. It’s simple things. You know, at the end of Kelly’s chapter [as surfing’s GOAT], after 11 world titles … Starting a brand. … Starting the surf ranch. I mean, he’s had a lot of great successes, but what he talks about is spending the day at the beach with his kid and being present for that. Learning how to be honest with people. The successes that we might not think of as a huge win for someone like Kelly are huge wins now.
Source: Episode 1284 of Fields’ Good Life Project podcast (gently edited for brevity and clarity)
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Wins available to us all. Today. No long searches required. No waiting to find other pursuits leave us wanting.
Present. Honest. Showing up for the people we love.
Wins my friend E. exemplifies. Already.
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“Simple.”
How might you respond?
