In Kung Fu there’s a principle that masters teach from day one, even though the student takes years to truly understand it: the perfect movement isn’t the most spectacular, nor the most complex, nor the one that activates the most muscles.
The perfect movement is the cleanest. The most efficient. The one that gets where it needs to go without excess energy, without flourishes, without unnecessary effort. And, paradoxically, reaching that clean, seemingly simple movement costs more than learning a hundred complicated techniques.
To make something easy you must first have gone through everything difficult, digested it, internalised it, and then have the maturity —and the judgement— to set it aside.
That’s what very few people do.
What usually happens is the opposite. And I saw it recently, at an event, with very specific profiles who arrived with very clear expectations. The event came loaded. Dense. Full of layers, of depth, of concepts piled one on top of another as if the goal were to prove there was a lot to see, a lot to teach, a lot to deliver. And somewhere along the way, someone forgot to ask who all of it was for.
The result was the usual one when this happens: people got lost. Not for lack of intelligence, but because the complexity wasn’t at the service of learning, it was at the service of the content.
Content has no participants. But participants do have needs.
The curious thing is that doing that —loading, complicating, going deep without judgement— is actually the easiest thing for whoever designs it. It’s simpler to dump everything you know than to choose what stays and what goes. It’s more comfortable not to ask whether this level of detail makes sense for this profile at this moment. It takes less effort not to adapt. And yet, whoever fills their mouth with “adding value” and “delivering quality content” struggles to admit that sometimes giving more is giving less.
The Kung Fu master who teaches the perfect movement hasn’t spent thirty years accumulating techniques. He’s spent thirty years discarding the ones that are superfluous.
I’ve learned this the hard way, like almost everything. There’s a huge difference between knowing a lot about something and knowing which part of what you know the person in front of you needs. The first is erudition. The second is judgement. And judgement is much harder to develop, like the clean movement of Kung Fu.
The next time you design an event, a presentation, a proposal or whatever it is, ask yourself a single question before adding the next slide: is this for me or is it for them?
If the answer makes you a little uncomfortable, you already have something to rethink.