Find the right building block to build your systems, ideas, processes or theories.
When building systems, the most important choice is often the primitive - the basic building block you choose to work with. Pick the wrong primitive, and you'll spend years adding complexity to make it work. Pick the right one, and things just click into place.
The Greeks struggled with this for 1,500 years. They used circles as their primitive to explain planetary orbits. This led to increasingly complex systems of circles-within-circles (called epicycles) to explain what they saw in the sky. Then Kepler tried something slightly different - he used ellipses instead of circles. Suddenly, all that complexity vanished.
This pattern shows up everywhere in technology. We often start with a simple primitive that seems right, then add layers of complexity to make it work. Sometimes what we need isn't a better implementation - it's a better primitive.
Take the modern internet. We built it on hyperlinks - simple pointers from one page to another. Now we're dealing with an ecosystem optimized for clicks rather than meaning. What if that's not an implementation problem? What if it's a primitive problem?
The next time you see a system growing more complex over time, with endless special cases and patches, ask yourself: Did we pick the wrong primitive?