When Google launched in 1998, search engines were portals — cluttered pages covered in news, weather, links, and ads. Yahoo's homepage alone had over 100 links competing for attention.

Google offered something radical: a logo, a search box, and two buttons. That was it.

The instinct to add more is hard to resist. Read on to discover why more isn't always better. 

It’s summer 1997. Apple is wobbling, and the conference room has the tired smell of corporate wishful thinking. A new comeback line is pitched: “We’re back.” Heads nod. Then Steve Jobs, newly returned to the company, cuts through it: Apple isn’t “back” yet. A slogan can’t be a victory lap. It has to be a compass.

In the late 2000s, a new kind of newsroom sprang up in Southern California. It didn’t chase scandals or city hall. It chased search bars. If enough people were asking the same question online, a system would spot it, calculate the advertising value and send the assignment out to a freelancer — fast. “How to unclog a drain.” “How to train a puppy.” “How to remove candle wax.” The goal wasn’t great writing. The goal was coverage. The blank spaces of the internet were suddenly treated like farmland and content was the crop.

Last week, Mrinank Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies. Sharma wasn't a mid-level engineer or a disgruntled employee. He led the company's Safeguards Research Team. His job was to keep AI safe.

In his resignation letter, posted publicly on X, Sharma wrote: "The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment." He added that throughout his time at Anthropic, he had "repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions." His final project before leaving? Understanding how AI assistants could make us less human.

You've spent years in your field. You know the terminology, the frameworks, the nuance behind every decision. That expertise is hard-won — and it might be getting in your way.

There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Once you know something deeply, it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was like not to know it. The language that feels precise to you sounds like static to someone hearing it for the first time.

For most of history, grocery shopping looked nothing like it does today. You walked into a store, handed a list to a clerk and waited. The clerk fetched flour from one barrel, sugar from another and canned goods from shelves you never touched. Shopping was efficient, but it was also invisible. Customers didn't browse. They didn't linger. They didn't discover.

If you’ve ever built a piece of IKEA furniture, you know the moment. You open the box, spread the parts across the floor and stare at a small paper booklet filled with tiny drawings. No words or explanations; just arrows, dots and the suggestion that this should all make sense.

In 1933, commuters in London were drowning in information. The city’s underground railway had grown rapidly, and official maps tried to show every tunnel exactly as it existed underground. Lines curved and twisted to match geography. Distances were technically accurate. Streets, rivers and landmarks crowded the page. The result was a mess. Riders squinted, hesitated and missed their stops — not because the system was broken, but because the message was.

Think about the brands you recognize instantly — not by their logo, but by how they sound. A certain tone, a turn of phrase, a personality that comes through even in a short email.

Now ask yourself: does your organization have that kind of voice?