Under-Complicate Things

We humans tend to overcomplicate things. With piano, we think it's harder than it needs to be. We worry about too many things. 

And discover a level of self-consciousness that borders on paranoia. 

But you know what isn't a word in the dictionary? Undercomplicate.

It shows up with the red squiggly line under my editor, telling me it's not a real word. If I hyphenate it, it's a little more forgiving. So, for the sake of being grammatically correct, we'll go with under-complicate.

As a society, we need to under-complicate things. 

When something's stressful, figure out how to make it less stressful.

When a problem feels overwhelming, ask yourself what the simplest way is to solve it. Under-complicate it.

I'll give you an example.

In one of my previous jobs, there was an issue with student enrollment. The administration went into crisis mode and overcomplicated it. 

There were expensive marketing initiatives launched. Enrollment and retention committees formed to figure out what the problem was. I'm sure dozens of spreadsheets and complex analyses were created.

But, you know what the problem was? (And I only know this because multiple students came our direction, telling us the same story.)

The person at the front desk wasn't returning phone calls and emails...

When you have a big problem, find the most under-complicated solution.

It's probably the right one.