Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 43

Being elegant means developing your ability to describe a concept in a beautiful and simple way for easy understanding.

Jeff Karp is a scientist inspired by elegance . . . and jellyfish.

As an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, Karp’s research focuses on using bio-inspiration—inspiration from nature—to develop new solutions for all types of medical challenges. His self-named Karp Lab has developed innovations such as a device inspired by jellyfish tentacles to capture circulating tumor cells in cancer patients and better surgical staples inspired by porcupine quills.

Nature is filled with elegant solutions, from the way that forest fires spread the seeds of certain plants to the way termites build porous structures with built-in heating and cooling.

I believe it’s this idea of simplicity that’s fundamental to developing elegant ideas. As Albert Einstein famously said, “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

A good example of things described beautifully is in what talented poets do. Great poetry has simplicity, emotion, and beauty because superfluous words are edited out of the verse. Poets are masters of elegance; they obsess over language and understand that less can mean more.

You don’t need to become a poet overnight, but some of these principles can help you get better at creating more elegant descriptions of your own ideas. To illustrate how, here’s the process I used to name my trends in previous reports.