Complicated…

Not sure if I have written about this before. May be I have. But, one has to vent out their frustrations too in a mind sharing community like this..isnt it? And, chances are that, everyone will have a list of “n” topics in which they get frustrated. So, the manifestation of it in different forms do show up when one keeps it transparent…

Anyway, one of the common terms used in a company is that, some “xyz” is very complicated. I get annoyed whenever I hear that term. There are things that I understand and things that I dont. Not because I dont understand it after reading up on it, but rather the ignorance part of it. I think, just the ignorance aspect of a topic doesnt make any topic complicated. It just means that it may not make any sense when someone talks about it. But, once you understand, you know what it is… Here, the term “difficult” should not be confused with. Something that is difficult to understand could be termed complicated. But then, if something is difficult to understand, then it just shows that one is more ignorant in the topic talked about. For example, a brand new recipe for a chef is something that he can understand though it could be very difficult from a layman’s perspective. When I say this, I do have to mention that some people just ride on terminologies. For example, they will use the term LRU instead of least-recently-used or LIFO instead of last-in-first-out when they talk to someone who is already ignorant of what the other person is talking about, making it seemingly difficult to understand hence move towards branding it as complicated. When you know the real meaning, a lot of it would make obvious sense.

I understand that people strive for publicity and being termed elite and so on. But, if the purpose of the conversation is to just prove that, like an interview or a marketing/sales pitch to another company, it makes perfect sense. But, when it comes to pure transfer of knowledge, it is not about telling people what you know, it is about telling them what they don’t know in a language that they can understand. If that were the case, nothing is as complicated as it may seem. I do agree that, as you add more and more detail to a concept, it does get a little ugly to quantify in a simple statement. But, all concepts are built on basics and everything else is just an if-else condition within that basic theme. Bottom line, good speakers and good listeners can make this world less complicated…:)