Simplify your life with the mental model known as Occam’s razor

Legend has it that NASA spent a decade and millions of dollars developing a ballpoint pen that would work in zero gravity and function in extreme temperatures.
The Soviets used a pencil.
The story of the “write stuff” turns out to be a myth. Pencil tips have a habit of breaking and getting into nooks and crannies — which may be okay on Earth, but not so okay on a spacecraft where they can find their way into mission-critical equipment or end up floating into an astronaut’s eyeball.
But the moral of the myth still holds. As Einstein put it, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”
This principle is known as Occam’s razor. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick starring a ghoul named Occam and his preferred weapon, the razor. But it’s actually a mental model named after William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century philosopher.
The most elegant theories rest on the fewest number of assumptions. The most elegant solutions, in the words of the author David Murray, “are those that use the least number of components to solve the greatest number of problems.”
Simple systems have fewer points of failure. Complicated things break more easily. Every brilliant new idea has the potential to generate a dozen unintended, and sometimes disastrous, consequences. Every brilliant new component, system, or app that promises a breakthrough has the potential to break through and through.
For the vast majority of my life, I took none of the advice I’m laying out here. I’ve had what can charitably be described as an obsession with the new. I was every computer company’s dream customer, the stereotypical early adopter, the first in line to buy the new hardware or download the new beta operating system filled with bugs. When I started my blog, I stacked one plugin on top of the other to enhance the user experience.
This Jenga tower collapsed at the worst possible moment. One of my articles — titled Facts Don’t Change Minds. Here’s What Does — went viral. It sent hundreds of thousands of viewers to a website that had previously been frequented by four people a day. The skyrocketing views put my shiny plugins to the test, and they failed spectacularly. The website crashed — right when many of these first-time viewers may have been turning into long-term readers.