The way people organize their lives seems to depend on three virtues. Is it simple, useful, or beautiful?

If you’ve ever been overwhelmed by what’s happening in life, you’ve probably longed for a simple solution.

When you have failed to do the things you want to do, you reach for a useful solution.

And when the people around you organize their lives with beautiful journals or Notion pages, you’re probably drawn to having one of your own.

A funny thing happens when we try to adopt these things, however.

• Simple can look ugly or not be useful enough.
• Useful can be overly complicated and look “wrong”.
• Beautiful solutions can be both “too much” and yet strangely “not enough”.

Most of us are like Goldilocks tasting someone else’s soup, chairs, and beds hoping to declare one of them “just right”.

And some of us discover a passable solution we evangelize to other people.

But I think we’re all better off when we realize that there is no perfect solution. We can’t have it all and have it be simple and beautiful and useful. And even if we could, we probably won’t use it that way. And then, even if we do use it, we aren’t likely to gain all that much from it.

The irony, of course, is that simple, useful, and beautiful really can go together. But we’re busy asking too much, looking for too many shortcuts, and not realizing we’re stealing someone else’s soup.

Write stuff down and make yourself look at it again. That’s probably the most elegant approach in the end.