When I was still in the projects business—which by now feels like an archaeological layer of my former life—I was obsessed with modeling everything. I wanted the model, the grand unified spreadsheet of existence. A single glorious beast that would take a few variables, churn them through its magnificent digital entrails, and out would come a perfect project—metrics, forecasts, margins, timelines, divine order itself rendered in cells and formulas.
And for a while, it worked. Sort of. It also behaved like every overdesigned system ever conceived: theoretically brilliant, practically unbearable. It was clunky, bloated, and perpetually haunted by bugs that refused to die. Every new project required hours of recalibration, patchwork fixes, and ritual cursing. The bigger and more “sophisticated” it got, the less I trusted its output. I had created a spreadsheet cathedral—beautiful, intricate, and useless in the rain.
One day I’d had enough. I scrapped the monster. In its place, I built a series of small, crude spreadsheets—each doing one simple thing and doing it well. They weren’t pretty, they didn’t try to impress anyone, but they worked. I chained them together manually, not for elegance but for truth. The results were raw, fast, and surprisingly honest. No illusions of grandeur, no statistical theatre. Just data that smelled right.That’s when I learned a lesson the modern world keeps forgetting: complexity is seductive, but clarity wins. The simpler my models became, the more they reflected reality instead of my ambitions. Big and complex always promises insight but delivers fog. The real world never plays by the rules of an overengineered spreadsheet—it only rewards those willing to see things as they are, not as they calculate them to be.