MAY 2009 - Doing More With Less
Kim Pick, Head of Copy, Rapp New Zealand Office
In New Zealand, with its geographic isolation and puny population of just 4 million people (the size of a city in most countries), "doing more with less" is a way of life. It's not so much a philosophy as a necessity.
Kiwi physicist Ernest Rutherford, the first to split the atom, summed it up: "We don't have the money. So we have to think."
And that's what we've had to do, from Edmund Hillary, who was the first to conquer Mount Everest using "a lot of enthusiasm", to Burt Munro, who broke the world land speed record on a motorbike he put together in his garden shed, using tins for casting and an old bicycle spoke for a micrometer. (His resulting success was documented in the movie "The World's Fastest Indian".)
In New Zealand, it's referred to as "Kiwi ingenuity" or "number eight wire mentality". (A farmer, with nothing more than a piece of number eight gauge fencing wire, can fix any number of things.) In the US, you might call it the "MacGyver" factor.
Whatever you call it, it's about "making the best you can, with what you have, now".
And if, as a result of the global economy, that's what the whole world must do, then you'll be relieved to know it's not such a bad thing. It's a very good thing actually.
Because when you don't have much, it's astonishing what you can do with it.
The secret is, as counter-intuitive as it may sound: constraints are liberating. And they are what create seismic shifts in thinking.
Given an unlimited budget, or unlimited time, what do you do? (Go to lunch probably, to mull over where to begin.)
But given a precise set of limitations—in fact, the more limitations the better—now you're sharply focused. Now that you don't have to consider what you can't do, you can concentrate more intently on what you can.
This may expose my populist television viewing habits, but think about those cooking shows where the team has two minutes to create a culinary masterpiece from a tin of tomatoes, an onion and a carrot.
Or that recent episode of Project Runway, when contestants were given a budget of $80 and forced to design catwalk-ready haute couture using only cut-price grocery items from the corner store. Mop-heads were woven into intricate macramé. Fly swatters, trimmed and stitched together, formed shimmering Mondrian armour. The results were jaw dropping—and caused me to linger on my subsequent trips to the supermarket, marvelling at the lateral possibilities of paper plates and mousetraps.
Fewer options also make it easier to decide. (Not surprisingly, because the word "decide", from the same family as "homicide" and "suicide", means literally: "kill options".)
So "Do more with less" isn't a punishment or an admonishment. It is a relief. And a challenge. And possibly the most liberating thing you can hear.
"Do more with less!" (Just don't tell anyone; they'll all be wanting it.)
Look at the innovations from the 1930s—radio, TV, aviation, nylon, radar: they arose from amidst the limitations of the Great Depression.
Look at the current rise and rise of Twitter—a social media phenomenon founded on the very constraint that you can't write more than 140 characters.
We thrive on less. And it's a truth that, instinctively, we do more with less. We always have done. We were born with this ability, and desire, to make something of nothing.
Give a child an extravagant toy in a box at Christmas, and what do they do? They play with the box. The box becomes a garage, a library, a fort, a toy store, a tank, a car, a speed boat. Later, when it's mangled from play, it still gets flattened and becomes a grass toboggan. The extravagant toy, which already has been fully defined by the manufacturer and is now limited in its options, remains exactly what it always was: an extravagant toy.
Less is so much more.
What delights us is simplicity itself—and so often we overlook it.
In art, in music, in food...it is not extravagance or abundance that defines us at our best—it is the pared down beauty of a pure idea, or image, or sound, or taste.
So let's not fight less. Let's cheerfully embrace it—welcoming the focus of constraints, and wherever we can, working towards "less" as a goal: peeling away the unnecessary in what we do to find the beauty of simplicity at its core.
We may not have the extravagant toy in the box. But we'll have the box. And what are we going to do with its infinite possibilities?
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