If you’ve ever looked at SpaceX’s Raptor engine evolution, you’ve witnessed something profound. The earliest versions look like mechanical nightmares with a million parts to tweak and adjust. The latest? Almost nothing left to fiddle with. This isn’t just good engineering. It’s a fundamental truth about how complexity works in our world, and it completely changes how you should think about building anything.
Nature’s Template for Everything
There’s a fascinating pattern in complexity theory. Whenever you find something intricate working perfectly in nature, it’s almost always the output of something incredibly simple that got repeated over and over. We’re watching this unfold right now with AI. You take brutally simple algorithms, feed them massive amounts of data, and suddenly they’re doing things that seem magical.
The reverse? Total disaster. Design something super complex from the start and try to scale it. Watch it crumble under its own weight. There’s just too much going on, too many dependencies, too many things that can break.
The Real Work Happens in Reverse
Most of us think product design means adding features. Building more. Making it do everything. But the actual work is the opposite. You iterate until you find what truly matters, then you ruthlessly strip away everything else. You’re extracting simplicity from the noise you created.
Look at iOS versus Mac OS. iOS is closer to what an operating system should be at its core. It’s more intuitive, more essential. Mac OS still carries decades of complexity baggage. And honestly? An LLM speaking natural language might be even simpler than both.
When things scale, they have to get simpler. The Raptor engine proves this. As the team figured out what actually worked, they realized most parts were unnecessary. Remove, remove, remove.
Question Everything First
Elon Musk has this method that sounds almost too simple to be revolutionary. Before you optimize anything, before you try to make something more efficient, you go back to square one. You question the requirements themselves.
Not the department. Not the process. The actual human being who decided this requirement should exist. You track them down and ask: Do we really need this?
Only after eliminating unnecessary requirements do you look at parts. Get rid of as many as possible while still fulfilling what’s truly necessary. Then, and only then, do you think about optimization, manufacturing efficiency, and cost savings.
The Fiberglass Mat Story
Musk once camped out at a Tesla production line because fiberglass mats were slowing everything down. His team tried optimizing the robot that glued these mats to batteries. They made it faster. But it was still frustratingly slow.
Finally, he asked the question: Why do these mats even exist?
Battery team: “Noise reduction.”
Noise team: “No, fire protection.”
Battery team again: “No, noise reduction.”
Nobody actually knew. They tested it. Turns out they didn’t need the mats at all. Eliminated. Problem solved.
This happens constantly with complex systems. People do things because that’s how they’ve always been done. The requirements become inherited folklore rather than actual necessities.
The Polymath Advantage
Everyone calls themselves a generalist these days. It’s become a way to avoid committing to any real expertise. But what you actually want to be is a polymath. Someone who can pick up any specialty to at least the 80/20 level and make intelligent tradeoffs.
The person who takes a product from zero to one needs to hold the entire problem in their head. They don’t need to design every component or understand every manufacturing detail. But they absolutely need to know why each piece exists and what happens to parts B, C, D, and E if you remove part A.
Want to build that capability? Study physics. Once you understand how reality actually works, you can pick up electrical engineering, computer science, material science, statistics. Physics is so unforgiving that it beats all the comfortable falsities out of you. Social sciences? You can hold 90% false knowledge and never realize it.
If you’re past the point of formal education, just build things. The best people aren’t just educated. They’re tinkerers. They’re the ones building racing drones before drones become military tech. They’re assembling personal computers in garages because waiting for institutions is too slow.
These builders live at the edge of knowledge because they’re always using the latest tools to create the coolest things.
Your Move
Next time you’re building something, adding a feature, or solving a problem, flip your instinct. Don’t ask what you can add. Ask what you can remove. Track down every requirement to an actual human and make them defend it. Strip your creation down to its essential core.
Because the products that change the world aren’t the ones with the most features. They’re the ones that figured out what truly matters and had the courage to eliminate everything else.
That’s where the magic lives.
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