Most of us have several wishes and desires for the way we want to live our lives, for the things we wish to do, for the people we wish to be with and for the things we wish to have. And we constantly work towards getting one or more of these.

And every time we get one, we add three others to the list of things that we want. And then we work ever harder to get one of those while making sure we don't lose or let go of what we have.

We try to pick up more and more while keeping everything we pick up, only dropping something in order to upgrade to a better or bigger version of the same.

We operate with the principle of more is always better. And we end up with something like this:


When it comes to product design, and when it comes to running a business, living by this philosophy is the first step towards a painful death.

In product design, we follow the opposite principle. We constantly try to minimise the information shown to a user, we try to minimise the input that a user needs to provide and we try to make it extremely easy and simple to do exactly what they want to do. And take away all the frills.

The best designs are the simple ones.

What if we lived our lives that way?

Instead of always looking to see what else we can acquire while keeping everything that we already have, what if we constantly look for things that we have but we can lose or let go?

My guess is we will end up with something like this:


And that's the choice we all have.