--- title: Only Solve Hard Problems When You Have To teaser: Don't make your problem harder than it has to be. tags: business author: Matt Jankowski published_on: 2006-12-06 --- When you have the option of doing something in a complicated backwards way or a really straightforward simple way - choose the simple way. This sounds really obvious, but consistently doesn't happen. In the same way that you should [rise above the internal constraints of organizations][stupid-things], you can rise above the desire to do simple things in complicated ways. [stupid-things]: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/doing-stupid-things-is-a-choice Sometimes a CMS just needs to edit pages - and that's all. Maybe it doesn't need a revision history that tracks everything anyone's ever done to a piece of content. And even if it does, maybe you can do that in a really non-rocket-science sort of way. The key is to solve the problem you're solving - not the imaginary-but-complex problem that you might **want** to be solving.