If people walk away from this worker, this, you know, discussion that we're hoping to spur here, thinking only one thought, which is, I have a choice. If I see a complicated problem in my personal life, my organization society, I have a choice between a complicated solution and a simple solution. If that's all they walk away with, we will be very happy.

What if the simplest option was the best option? That's something that a lot of people struggle with. We live in a complex, complicated world, and we tend to assume that to get where we want to go, to build what we want to build, to create amazing things and solve big problems.

Well, the process, the answer, the rules have to be big and complex too. In this week's conversation with the author of a book called Simple Rules, Donald's Cell, we dive into this, and we actually really pull back a lot of the mythology, and he actually shares some pretty interesting research that shows that in fact, simple very often, is best.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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Alright, so you threw it out there. I think this is a fun place to start. So I'm sitting across from the table from a clearly extremely accomplished, smart, intelligent, academic, and professional world man.

But you have a history as a balancer and a bike a bar while you're alive.

So I worked my way through college, and one of the jobs I had was working as a balancer and a bar. And the bar was exactly, almost exactly halfway between Harvard and MIT on Mass App.

So if I tell you that, or if I tell most people that they picture some, you know, Ivy covered bar, so with people sitting around talking about proofs or string theory or something.

Yeah, exactly, right. Exactly. You know, probably a no alcohol beer. And this bar wasn't that at all. So it had all glass windows and it had a live band every night. And that turns out it's the magic formula for attracting bikers. In this case, the local motorcycle club, the Rampant rustlers. And the reason for this is, of course, they, you know, they like to listen to the bands seven nights a week. That was great.

But also they could watch their Harley's while they were drinking. And this is pretty much, yeah, this is pretty much Nirvana for bikers. So, and the reason I end up ended up in that job is the owner of the bar was a Harvard alum.

And he'd hire folks from the Harvard hockey team in the Harvard boxing club. And I boxed through college. And so I can't need the job. It was great money. It was a pretty rough place. Right. Like, you know, I was a middleweight and there were a lot of heavy weights in that bar.

So, you know, I was trying to punch above my weight and it wasn't working particularly well. In my first month on the job, I made two trips to the emergency room. So, you know, boom. So I realized I was going to have to use a different strategy.

And so I remember quite clearly after the second trip to the emergency room, I think, okay, what can I do to manage this situation? Great job. You know, meet interesting people, great bands, you know, free drinks. What's not good money? What's not to like? But, you know, brute force was not working for me.

So I came up with a set of rules. So the first one was don't let trouble in the door. So it turns out it is so much easier to keep a knucklehead out of the door than throw a knucklehead out the door later.

The second one was sober, beat strong. So it turns out people think like, you know, when you drunk, you're a good fighter. The exact opposite true. You're more prone to fight, but your reflexes are slow and so forth.

So I wouldn't start drinking till the bar closed, which, you know, frankly, might have been bar policy. Anyway, I'm not.

That might have been what we're supposed to do. Anyway, the third rule was for certain types of bands, like, particularly Scott, heavy metal and punk, they were always fights.

So you know, I just go to the owner of the manager and say, listen, let's get another guy in the door just, you know, for these.

But by far the most useful rule was to keep the bikers on side. So like common sense dictated, you don't tick the bikers off. You know, because these guys, they're big guys with nicknames, like, and I kid you not.

Shotgun mother killer man mountain, you know, so with the nicknames like this, you have to you want to, you know, kind of keep them on side.

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