

This point has been made before on Obamacare, but the tendency behind it, the tendency to muddle and mask benefits, has become endemic to center-left politics. Now it’s, “you didn’t used to be able to log on to a website and negotiate between 15 different providers to pick a platinum or gold or zinc plan and apply a fucking formula for a subsidy that’s gonna change depending on your income so you might end up having to retroactively owe money or have a higher premium.” Holy shit, thank you so much. They could say to you, “you didn’t used to have money when you were old, now you do. The reason they held Congress for 40 years after enacting Social Security is because Social Security was right in your fucking face.
Keep it simple quotes how to#
You don’t have to go to a goddamned website and become a fucking hacker to try to figure out how to pick the right plan, they just tell you “you’re covered now.” And that’s it! That’s all it ever should have been and that is why - is bemoaning why it’s a political failure? Because modern neoliberal, left-neoliberal policy is all about making this shit invisible to people so that they don’t know what they’re getting out of it.Īnd as Rick Perlstein has talked about a lot, that’s one of the reasons that Democrats end up fucking themselves over.

There are parts to it that are unambiguously good - like, Medicaid expansion is good, and why? Because there’s no fucking strings attached. And, in the interest of supporting a united front between liberals and socialists, let me start this off with a rather long quote from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House, on why Obamacare failed to gain more popularity: Read all of Susan Payton’s articles on Democrats stare down eight years of policies being wiped out within months, it’s worth looking at why those policies did virtually nothing for their electoral success at any level. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm hungry for pizza. Realize that it might take some work to get to simplicity, but in the long run, it'll be well worth that time investment.

So ask your employees, friends, and colleagues how they would simplify the situation. This may be challenging because the way you've been doing things is now ingrained in your brain and you've lost perspective. Once you identify the things that are overly complex, brainstorm ways you can simplify them. Maybe your checkout process involves three pages. What stresses you out every time you've got to deal with it? And don't forget to look at things from the customer's perspective. I encourage you to look at your business and ask yourself what is unnecessarily complicated. Trying to use 10 keywords on a web page to attract the maximum amount of customers can work against you (and piss off Google). How am I supposed to filter through all of those? I needed a phone wallet for my S5, and upon searching for one, was presented with 1.2 million results. Offering too many choices to customers can overwhelm them and keep them from buying anything at all from you. If you tweak five things at once, how can you know which tactic is driving results? Which is holding you back from growth? Focusing on one change at a time allows you to measure it and assess results before moving on to the next change. Simpler is always better.Ĭonsider your marketing strategy. Then someone points at a map and says, "Or we could just do this." If there's an issue, I've already mapped out a complex and drawn-out solution. I'm not known for taking the path of least resistance. The company just took one simple idea and ran with it. It didn't require scientists squirreled away in an R&D center creating some magical new failure. And guess what happened? Sales went through the roof. But recently McDonald's decided to do something super simple: offer breakfast all day. Nobody expected these items to do well because McDonald's thrives at making hamburgers. Here's an example: McDonald's has tried over the years to overly complicate its menu with wild-card items like the McLobster and McSpaghetti. We've all heard the advice to "Keep it simple, stupid." But how many of us actually apply it to our businesses? It's easy to get trapped into thinking that we've got to continually increase the complexity of what we're doing.
