Seth Godin talks about ‘Dumbing Down vs Simplifying Up,’ and he’s got a great point…

In marketing, it seems like there’s a growing obsession with making everything stupidly simple.

The goal?

Keep people from running away when faced with something remotely complicated.

But here’s the problem: if you dumb everything down, all you get is… (cue ominous music) dumb, de dumb dumb DUMB!

There’s a ton of information out there and people are drowning in it. We’ve got an infinite number of articles, podcasts, and TikToks to consume.

The race to make everything a checklist or a “buzzword” like “SEO,” “machine learning,” or “cloud computing” might make things easier, but it also makes everything feel a little hollow.

It’s like slapping a 5-second summary on a movie, (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back) and calling it “the best film of the year.”

Doesn’t quite work, does it?

Real simplicity doesn’t mean stripping things down to the lowest common denominator. You don’t need to dumb down quantum physics to “stuff that goes boom” or turn advanced economics into, “supply and demand, but like, cheaper!”

Kids learn to speak, and second graders can read, not because someone gave them a “dumbed-down” version, but because teaching them was made simple, structured, and engaging.

Instead of dumbing things down, how about simplifying them? Break things down, explain the basics, then gradually build the depth. No one is asking for everything to be reduced to a meme. Let’s keep it simple, but don’t turn it into fluff.

After all, we don’t need more “easy.”

What we do need is more “smart made simple.”