Russell Davies collected several good examples of [how creative work is often not complicated, just hard](http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2013/01/its-not-complicated-its-just-hard.html).
More evidence [piles up](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=5060)…
> If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that’s one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.
> I’m not saying there’s no such thing as genius. But if you’re trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right. – [Paul Graham](http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html)
To which I’d add that if you think you’re a genius, you’re probably just being lazy and [too impatient](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=5060) to do things the right way.
> Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable…Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out. – [Barack Obama](http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama)
> Fiction is the study of the human condition through the medium of interesting lies. – [Charlie Stross](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/05/spoilers.html)
Great design is both extremely simple and incredibly difficult to achieve.
Simple, because it requires only a very few activities–observing people and expressing ideas–and those are not very complicated to perform. There are certainly tricks of the trade, and more or less efficient ways of doing these things, but the core actions are not complex.
Difficult, because the energy and dedication required to do these activities broadly, deeply, and thoroughly enough to find the *right* design solutions is hard to achieve. Most people [don’t have the patience](http://kennethto.tumblr.com/post/9359336429/when-you-first-start-off-trying-to-solve-a) to get there; instead, they settle too early to avoid the discomfort of [not “knowing”](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4619).
I still believe the most important thing I do as a designer is [tolerate ambiguity](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4079). And it’s still the hardest part of my job.
I wrote up the following questions to help a friend at work think about his design needs:
* Do you know the core user you’re designing for, and the top 2 or 3 ways your product will improve their lives? Do you think that combination will make a successful product? Could you [design the launch advertisement](http://www.designstaff.org/articles/opinionated-product-design-marketing-first-2012-03-16.html) today? Does everyone on the team agree on these things?
* If not, you need a *product* designer. Lots of explorations around a variety of opportunities & a process to decide on them. At the end you’ll have decisions on your target user, key benefits, and “unique selling points”.
* Do you know how those features will work: how they will be accessed and controlled, in what order, how they fit together, and how someone interacts with it?
* If not, you need an *interaction* designer, someone who can design a system that works elegantly and flexibly. You’ll get things like wireframes, interactive prototypes, flow diagrams, and page layouts.
* Do you know exactly how the product should look, all the way down to fonts, colors, and animations? Do you have pixel specifications for all these things?
* If not, you need a *visual* (or *industrial*) designer, possibly with motion graphics or video experience. You’ll get pixel-perfect specifications and design assets that are ready for production.
* And if you don’t have any of these things, you’ll need all of these people. They build on each other, but I’d start at the beginning with the product designer, who will understand the rest of the process. It’s very rare that one person will do all these things at a high level, however.
See also: [What I talk about when I talk about design](http://bob.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=4367)
>”Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But you are ready all the same to take on all of these unknowns, the uncertainties, the ambiguities. You are ready to succumb to the world of the story…
> First, there is that semblance of distance. We are not in the now, but rather in some place in the removed past…
> Distance is a psychologically powerful tool. It can allow us to process things that we would otherwise be unable to deal with—and I mean this in both a literal and a more metaphorical, emotional sense—and it frees up our mind in a way that immediacy does not.
> Second, there is the vagueness, the deliberate lack of specificity…that which scares us in real life—the lack of definitions, rules, clearly defined borders and boundaries—is not only unscary but entirely welcomed in the fairytale…I can indulge in abstraction and play, engage my curiosity and foster my creativity, and remain the whole time protected by that vague veneer of “once”.
[An insightful article and nice tribute to Maurice Sendak](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/2012/05/08/the-power-of-once-upon-a-time-a-story-to-tame-the-wild-things/).