Quote of the Day, from Jeff@Media

It’s London Web Week last week, and I attended @Media where keynote speaker, Jeff Veen, gave a pretty enlightening presentation on digital visualisation – and brought out the importance of mapping ‘dry’ data to meaningful references that click with real people’s day-to-day schema. There are plenty of good blogs out there summarising the conference, but I particularly resonated with Jeff’s ending quote from Steve Jobs,

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

I might have found the wrong quote here but the gist is, when we’re faced with problems we tend to first arrive at a simple solution, which is usually the wrong one, and then we realise the magnitude and the complexity of the whole situation.  People usually stop here.  It is with perseverance and the ability to distill layers of dependencies, very few of us arrive at the core, ‘simple’ solution.  It never comes easy.  But when it happens, you never feel any better.

/Staring at comment #33 on bugzilla…