Keep Things Simple—and Clear Out the Clutter Regularly

Verification notes (2026-10-28): 1. Schrödinger’s formulation: in What Is Life?, he proposed that life feeds on “negative entropy,” later revising this himself to free energy. The sentence quoted in the post is a paraphrase, not his original wording. It should read: “In What Is Life?, Schrödinger proposed that life feeds on negative entropy.” Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life 2. Robin’s reference to “Google’s recent organizational overhaul”: in December 2024, Pichai said that manager, director, and vice president positions had been reduced by about 10%. Sources: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-ceo-company-cut-manager-vp-roles-2024-12 https://www.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/google-layoffs-sundar-pichai-announces-major-job-cuts-in-these-top-roles-amid-threat-from-openai/articleshow/116504197.cms 3. The post has only the tag #極簡增長, without an author or book title. ---- Keep Things Simple—and Clear Out the Clutter Regularly Keeping a business and a life “simple” requires keen insight and considerable restraint from you and your team. Over time, most businesses become increasingly complex, even chaotic. This is almost inevitable—the phenomenon known as “increasing entropy.” Think of the wardrobes, storage cabinets, and cupboards in your home. You spend an entire day cleaning and organizing them thoroughly, and everything feels neat and orderly. Yet just a month later, they are a mess again. Lives and businesses becoming complex, even chaotic, seems to be a recurring pattern or common outcome. Schrödinger once said: “To live is to resist the ‘law of increasing entropy’; life feeds on negative entropy.” Keeping a business and a life “simple” therefore requires keen insight and considerable restraint from you and your team. #極簡增長 ---- Robin: “Large companies must constantly remind themselves to keep things simple; entrepreneurs must remind themselves to stay true to their original purpose. Even a slight deviation—say, a geometric angle of just 0.1 degrees or less—takes you further from your target the longer you travel. You therefore need a mechanism for continual recalibration. I see Google’s recent organizational overhaul as just such a recalibration. This problem is less severe for small and medium-sized businesses. But large companies became complicated through years of accumulation; a startup should not be complicated from the outset.”