Different, But Simple

You want to learn everything you can in your industry. You read the advice, hear the stories, follow the playbooks.

And then you look exactly like everyone else.

Maybe that works and it gets you where you want to be.

Or maybe it absolutely doesn't.

The real challenge isn't learning what everyone else knows. It's figuring out where to be different and how to be different. Knowing when different is the right move.

Not different for the sake of standing out. Different in a way that's still simple. Still understandable and still you.

Taking concepts and making them yours

I've always been obsessed with simplicity. I think because I overcomplicate so much at the beginning. But I realized something a long time ago: simplicity is hard to reach.

When I first build an automation without first thinking out the full flow, it's not simple. It's messy. I'm not thinking clearly right away, so the nodes pile up and the logic gets convoluted.

Simplicity is the highest sign of intelligence. You can tear everything down to its bare bones. But getting there? That takes work. It takes curiosity and focus.

I learned this with diet first. Read anything online about fitness and you'll drown in BS. Do this, don't do that, take this supplement, follow this protocol.

What it actually comes down to? Eat what you know is healthy, work out, and burn more calories than you consume.

Simple.

Same thing with investing. You need to do it because your dollars are getting devalued. Financial advisors make you think their complex strategy is what it takes. You gotta bet on this company, time the market, diversify across seventeen sectors. That always felt wrong to me ever since I was a 19 year old intern.

That summer I picked a 10 company portfolio that outperformed the portfolio of the entire firm by 20%. And I tried to convince myself I did all this complex research but really I just guessed.

Why must I think this hard to and divide up my money in a million places and take on all this risk just to save? Just never felt right.

Then I found Bitcoin. That's when the light bulb really switched on. Here was the simple replacement for using stocks to save money. Stocks always had too much variability, too much complexity. You gotta know this, time the market right, pick the winners.

Bitcoin was a replacement for money as a whole, not just for a way of saving dollars. Simplicity from the foundation, that made sense. That is simplicity.

The value proposition became clear once learning more and more.

More dollars will be printed. Only 21 million Bitcoin. Scarcity is scarce.

Know when you’re right

Be confident in your decisions. If you can't convince yourself to commit, don't start.

People spot hesitation instantly. Inconsistency kills credibility. When you abandon your position every few months, you become forgettable.

Stand for something long enough that people actually notice. If you pivot, make it clear why and where you're going.

How this applies to AI automation

That's how I want to build AI automation for small businesses.

I want to give them systems that work without the overload we're always experiencing. No complexity or overwhelm. Just a system that handles the tedious stuff.

ScreenFast is the perfect example. Drop your files and get an email. That's it.

I'm not offering it through some new platform. I'm offering it in the tools you already have (email, Excel, PDF, the files you already keep in Google Drive). All the complex processing happens in the background and the inputs and outputs remain simple.

AI automation sounds complex because it's new. I think the market needs to be educated on how it can actually be used. But at its core, it's just inputs to outputs, quickly.

You need to know the system first. Then you can simplify it. And the simpler it is from the start, the easier and cleaner the automation becomes.

The whiteboard test

I was listening to the Founders podcast this morning. Jensen Huang at NVIDIA has this rule: when people give him a presentation, they have to start with a blank whiteboard.

If you can't explain it starting from scratch, you're not thinking clearly about the topic.

I love that.

I find myself having ideas all the time that I think are solid, but they're not clear. They're not clearly thought out and that shows up in the work.

• The automation gets bloated.

• The pitch gets confusing.

• The product tries to do too much.

Then I get frustrating and must go back to the drawing board.

Cross-sectional thinking (or how to be different without adding complexity)

There's a concept from The Medici Effect about cross-sectional thinking. You take something from one field and apply it to another. Combining knowledge from different domains creates unexpected solutions.

I liked this idea so much I built a web app that helps generate these connections. You input what you're working on and it pulls insights from completely different industries.

Elon Musk does this constantly. The cooling system for one of the SpaceX rockets was too expensive. So he said, "Let's look at the one from an air conditioning unit for houses." And that's what they did.

He used his knowledge about carbon fiber from SpaceX and applied it to Tesla.

That's how you be different. Not by adding a million things. By applying knowledge from one place to solve problems in another.

By keeping it simple but unexpected.

Different, but simple

That's where I'm at right now. Pairing everything down.

Being different in business doesn't mean being more complex. It means being simple in a way that separates you. In a way the customer can still understand and relate to.

In a way that makes them think, "Oh, this just makes sense. Why isn't everyone doing it this way?"

That's the goal. Different, but simple.

Not simple like everyone else. Simple in your way.

Thanks for reading,

James