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Simplifier-Multiplier Collaboration: Identify your fundamental value-creation activity and discover a world of collaboration opportunities.

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Simplifier-Multiplier Collaboration: Identify your fundamental value-creation activity and discover a world of collaboration opportunities.

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Highlights & Notes

You have to develop a whole new idea of what the individual has to focus on for themselves. That’s half the picture. Then, you have to figure out whom to collaborate with—because the future is collaborative. And there are two fundamental skills of collaborating: simplifying and multiplying.

It used to be that we had access to limited resources, but we’re now able to connect with any resource or capability we want, so we have to take responsibility for figuring out what resources and capabilities we should be looking for.

The secret to life at all times is to develop mindsets that adjust to the circumstances you’re living in and give you access to the best possible resources and capabilities for your own personal growth.

You can commit yourself to looking at the complexity in your daily life as something endlessly good that you can transform into uniquely useful resources and capabilities for yourself and others.

know that by completely owning my complexity, I’ll come up with solutions—ones that are useful beyond me.

The process of successfully transforming complexity into new forms of value will get more powerful the more you do it. As a result, you’ll feel more confident, calm, and capable as time goes on.

The key is to stop being resentful of the complexity—and to stop resisting it. This will open up your creative abilities, which will lead you to being useful and to being protected from the negative impacts of complexity.

I pick the easiest thing to simplify today that will make my life less confusing and complicated tomorrow.

If a way you have of doing something works, don’t stop doing it. Once it’s simple, don’t make it complicated. It works for you, and it works for you uniquely.

Be a friend to yourself, not a taskmaster. Give yourself nudges—don’t beat yourself up.

If, previously, the world was running your life, you’re now reversing that force. You’re in charge.

You continually increase your personal and business success by multiplying your usefulness to everyone who matters most.

When you look at the marketplace, you’ll find millions of examples of people taking complex things and simplifying them. These simplifications can show up as products, services, processes, bypasses, replacements, and so on.

Simplifying can involve putting two things together to create a third, or taking something that already exists and adding something to it, and the result is a better solution than anything that’s already out there.

The best way to increase your productivity and profitability is to take your most valuable simplifier—where you’ve simplified something complicated and others have found it valuable—and multiply its value out in the world in the fastest possible ways. So, first, it has to be proven as being valuable to others, and then it becomes a matter of scaling.

If you’re a Simplifier and you want to multiply the usefulness of a simplifying process, you don’t necessarily need to learn how to use the technology that will get you there. You just need to work with people who can perform that multiplication for you. Team up with a Multiplier to make it an easier, more enjoyable process, letting them use their expertise to multiply your simplifier.

As soon as you create a new, better simplifier that others find valuable, many new kinds of Multiplier collaborators will emerge to help you increase your new value creation.

If you’re a successful entrepreneur, you’ve had experience in both simplifying and multiplying. But you can now choose which one you want to focus on and stay 100 percent on that side of the line, knowing that just on the other side is someone who can do the other part of the process and focus 100 percent on that.

You are completely clear that all future progress in a complex world requires combining simplifying and multiplying.

In the past, it was most likely just you doing everything that was needed, both the simplifying and the multiplying. But now you’ve broken it down into two distinct categories: making something better through simplifying, and then making it bigger through multiplying. You simplify complexity, and then you multiply the simplifier.

You’ll improve your business by asking yourself questions like, “What can be made simpler?” and “What needs to be multiplied?”

Progress in every area of life only happens when Simplifiers and Multipliers are working together.

Much if not all of your individual and organizational failure and frustration before now has come from trying to ignore, escape from, or fight back against complexity. This is silly when you think about it, since the trick to overcoming complexity is simply to combine your best simplifiers with your best multipliers.

If you review your past successes and failures, you’ll likely find that when things didn’t work, you were acting as both the Simplifier and the Multiplier without realizing the significance of either role. You were just doing everything that needed to be done, but you had no notion of the distinction between the activities. There have probably been times when you were simplifying when you should have been multiplying, and multiplying when you should have been simplifying, because you didn’t really know the difference.

Complexity is way bigger than you. It can’t be stopped or controlled. And you don’t need to stop it or control it. You just need to have a way of working with it.

You now accept that the best collaboration in every situation is between a skilled Simplifier and a skilled Multiplier.

You have to be 100 percent committed to either simplifying or multiplying. If you’re only 95 percent committed, you’ll be five percent thinking about the part of the collaboration you’re not responsible for.

Do you simplify complex problems or do you exponentially multiply others’ innovations?

Now, success is entirely about continuous, never-ending, skillful collaboration between you and others.

Success means that you’re making bigger and better improvements that are valuable to others and satisfying to yourself. It means that you can’t think of anything you’d rather be doing than what you’re doing.

You can take comfort in knowing that once you’re committed to either simplifying or multiplying, the success you have in collaborating with others will be continuous. You’ll always be able to reduce complications and competition, and you’ll always be able to create the biggest, best, most satisfying value.

I’m always alert, curious, responsive, and resourceful about potential collaborators and technologies I can partner up with to do the multiplying while I do the simplifying.

Simplifiers can get frustrated by having a great idea that they don’t know how to get out into the world. As the Multiplier, you see the Simplifier’s great idea and envision what you can do and what connections can be made in order to maximize the impact and opportunity of the idea. You don’t feel a need to be involved with the creation of the idea or to ask the Simplifier to modify the idea in any way. Just taking the simplifier capability and making it useful to others gives you joy. When you try to be the Simplifier yourself, it’s hard work that leaves you frustrated and fatigued, just like when a Simplifier tries to multiply things.

A Simplifier always goes inward, looking for the center of things, and a Multiplier always goes outward, expanding the simplifier’s value and reach.

“Who are the best existing users who can most quickly benefit from this new simplifier?”

So the best Multipliers—those who are truly into collaboration—make deals with each other; they don’t compete with each other. And that’s one way great Multipliers grow: linking up with other great Multipliers.

This simple formula of 100% Simplifier plus 100% Multiplier will always overcome complexity and bring the best results.

You’ll see in all your past experiences where you got energy and where you were frustrated and fatigued by what you were doing. When you had a painful experience, what was the activity? You were probably doing something that wasn’t your natural instinct, and so it was doomed to be a negative experience from the start.

Now that you recognize that you’re either 100 percent a Simplifier or 100 percent a Multiplier, and you give up 100 percent responsibility for the other capability, you’ll be amazed by how much you can get done week after week without feeling like you’re putting in a lot of effort.

But if you’re a Simplifier trying to multiply, or vice versa, technology and other tools are only going to exponentially multiply your frustration. Tools are useful only if they support your doing what you do best.

If you don’t know who you are in terms of how you create value in the world, it complicates all the areas of your life. Everything’s connected. If things are really working, that can be expanded through other things that work, and if things really aren’t working, that multiplies as well. You have to know who you are and respect that. Because it’s also true that if you’re a Simplifier who crosses the line into Multiplier territory or vice versa, you’re a Complicator.

Just remember what you’re good at and what other people find valuable in you. And no matter how much success you have, don’t forget the collaboration formula that got you there.

Treat your collaborators uniquely, letting them do their part in their own way, and they’ll grant you the same respect. There’s trust in collaboration, just as there’s mistrust in competition.

For the rest of your life, you’re responsible only for your own unique Simplifier-Multiplier collaborations. Creating your own uniquely surprising new kinds of collaborative value in the world is all that you’ll ever need to concern yourself with. Everyone else can make the same choice—to be unique.

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