If you’re an Olympic-level diver, the “degree of difficulty” on your dives is very important. For the rest of us, not so much.
When it comes to something like building a website, you can choose to use a tool like WordPress (like we do) to help with the basics, or you can choose to write every line of code from scratch. Doing it from scratch is easily 10x the work, but with no great return on value. There might be a few minor benefits in terms of speed or security, but it really doesn’t matter. Google won’t look at the site and say “it’s similar to the others, but it was more work to build so let’s rank it higher.“
The pile of dirt
It reminds me of a few years ago when we had a huge pile of dirt delivered to our driveway, intended to be moved to the backyard to fill in an old sinkhole. I start doing it by hand with a wheelbarrow, but realized it would be days of work to do it all. Instead, we hired a man with a Bobcat to do the work for us, and he had it all done in about 20 minutes.
Did using the Bobcat make it worse? Certainly not. Just because my way was more difficult doesn’t mean it was any better. In fact, the Bobcat guy tidied up a few other areas of the yard while he worked, making his method considerably more valuable than mine.
Where more is more
There are cases where I think an increased degree of difficulty can be valuable. For example, a few months ago I shared my process for making my notes a bit more cumbersome, in an attempt to force me to interact with them more. Automating my notes would make the process far for efficient, but far less valuable to me.
The title of this post comes from a quote from Charlie Munger, who undoubtedly created it reference to investing. There may be cases like diving or note-taking where degree of difficulty matters, but in most areas of life making something unnecessarily more difficult to complete is of no additional value.
