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From confusing manuals to uninterpretable jargon and bureaucratic red-tape, modern life can be highly complicated and frustrating. For many of us it is almost impossible to make sense of.
In Simplicity, lateral-thinking guru Edward de Bono shows us how to bring clarity into our increasingly complicated lives. Through his ten rules of simplicity, he encourages us to be creative and break down the complex into manageable and recognisable parts. By making the complicated simple, you will free up time, reduce stress and make better decisions.
Edward de Bono invented the concept of lateral thinking. A world-renowned writer and philosopher, he is the leading authority in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.
Dr de Bono has written more than 60 books, in 40 languages, with people now teaching his methods worldwide. He has chaired a special summit of Nobel Prize laureates, and been hailed as one of the 250 people who have contributed most to mankind.
Dr de Bono's titles include classic bestsellers such as Six Thinking Hats, Lateral Thinking, I Am Right You Are Wrong, Teach Yourself How To Think, Teach Your Child How To Think, and Simplicity - all now re-issued by Penguin.
www.edwdebono.com
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Edward de Bono not only makes the case for simplicity but he exhorts us to pursue it and he gives us a framework for doing so.
I can look back on many occasions when I wish I could whipped out such a book from my briefcase and thumped it in front of the annoying or imbecilic person with whom I was dealing at the time and said "Go home, read that, then come back and resume this discussion".
I find that I have underlined many useful comments or ideas. My favourite is possibly this:
"An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore." On the other side of the coin, de Bono has some harsh words for people who try to establish themselves as experts by making things more complex and more difficult to understand. Keep this in mind when dealing with "experts".
The book loses points for being way too long. In the edition I read, the main text was printed only on the right hand pages and an extract or summary of that text was printed in large letters on the facing left hand page, thereby turning a 150 page book into a 300 page book. Very irritating. Indeed, in illustrating a point in the book, de Bono says that he could have made the book - by which I assume he is referring to the main text on the right hand pages - shorter (simpler) but his publishers told him that it had to be a certain length! So, by his own admission (or, perhaps, apology) this should have been a 50 page book.
It's a pity, because it would have been a better book if it had been simplified.
Maybe one day de Bono will take a leaf out of his own book and simplify his main works into a single slim volume. It must be satisfying to look back on a life's work filling the bookshelves, but how much more satisfying would it be to have that life's work in a single volume and thereby easily accessible. It could be called "The Readers Digest de Bono", or "The Best of de Bono" or, perhaps, ideally, "de Bono Simplified".
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