Bottomless Subtleties

Jason Fried writes in his post “Knives and battleships”:

Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!"

Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career's worth of work.

Mastery comes from a lifetime of putting together the basics in different combinations.

I think of Beethoven’s 5th and its famous “short-short-short-long” motif. The entire symphony is essentially the same core idea repeated and developed relentlessly! The same four notes (da-da-da-DAH!) moving between instruments, changing keys, etc.

Beethoven took something basic — a four note motif — and extracted an enormous set of variations. Its genius is in illustrating how much can be explored and expressed within constraints (rather than piling on “more and more” novel stuff).

Back to Jason’s point: the simplest building blocks in any form — music, code, paint, cooking — implemented with restraint can be combined in an almost infinite set of pleasing ways.

As Devine noted (and I constantly link back to): we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of what we can do with less.