A lot of "complicated" problems have simple solutions.

It doesn't seem like this is true because smart people don't want to admit that their problems have simple answers; they want to feel like they have difficult problems that need years of experience to solve.

Ravi Gupta, a partner at Sequoia, told this story in an interview on The Knowledge Project:

There’s this person who I worked with at Instacart….She was an ops leader in San Francisco, and the scenario she would give during an interview is, "You’re one of the managers in San Francisco, and one of the people at the Safeway in Potrero Hill calls you and says, 'The refrigerator where we store the groceries isn't working. What do we do?"

She said you get all these answers…. Sometimes people have backgrounds that are academic in nature. They'd say, “I’d call all the rest of the stores and I’d figure out if there’s a systematic problem with our fridges.” “I would analyze the data, I’d look at the sales that we’re going to lose in that store based on the fridge, and I would try to create a new algorithm that didn’t have people drop it off in the store,” and all these answers.

At first, this seems like a "complicated" problem. The fridge plays a vital role in Instacart's business at a store. If the fridge is broken, what do they do with all the orders? They could cancel them, but that would make a lot of customers angry. They could try and transfer the orders to a different store, but again, that would leave a lot of customers unhappy. Maybe you could run a promo for free delivery? But if you did that, you'd have to get engineers involved to make it all work in the app.

This is how easy it is to make it feel like you have a "complicated" problem.

The answer they were looking for in the interview was devastatingly simple:

Then the people she’d hire every time would be like, “I’d go to Potrero Hill and I’d fix the fridge. Or, I’d go and stop somewhere else and buy a new fridge and bring it there.” Every time. She’s like, “The answer is ‘Fix the fridge.’ Find a way to have us have a refrigerated thing as soon as possible so we can continue to run the business.”

Don't overcomplicate the problems in your life to make yourself aware of—or demonstrate to others—your brilliance.

If you have a problem, look for the simple solution first.

If the fridge is broken, fix the fridge.