“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Source: Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Terre des hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1939). Original: “La perfection est atteinte, non pas lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à retirer.”
Each day I remove three things. Could be a physical item, an app off my phone or a subscription on autopay. I once had two cell plans running side by side. One was cut. The list of systems I’m maintaining gets shorter each week.
This habit is a small version of an old game.
A jellyfish has no brain. It has lasted 500 million years. Sponges are simpler still and 600 million years old. Horseshoe crabs have held the same body plan for 450 million years. Nautilus, roughly 500 million.
Simple body plans outlast complex ones. Each organ is one more part that can fail. Fewer parts means fewer breaks. Fewer breaks means better odds of the lineage staying alive across deep time. The pattern is probabilistic. A simple creature can still get wiped out. But over hundreds of millions of years, simple wins more often than complex.
The same math applies to software. A CSV file plus a cron job that runs reliably for five years outperforms the microservices platform that needs constant tending. Each abstraction layer is a future maintenance bill. The Craigslist homepage still works. Most “modern” redesigns of Craigslist competitors are dead.
A jellyfish hunts effectively with muscle and nerve. A sponge filters its body weight in water each day. The work gets done with fewer parts. Reaching simple takes more effort than staying complex.
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What are you maintaining that you could remove without losing anything?
