My favourite shop is in the high street of the nearby town of Crabbs Cross. Teague’s Televisions doesn’t sell televisions, it repairs them.

Repairs them? But no one repairs things any more, surely. And a television? Actually, Mr Teague has also overhauled for me a favourite 25-year old Kenwood mixer and a Raclette machine that used to make all the lights go out when you switched it on. Teague’s Televisions is a small shop, full of used and occasionally decrepit electrical goods waiting for careful repair or collection by a grateful owner. The smell of dust and solder flux hangs in the air – it’s the smell of effort and of careful repairs.

All this in stark contrast to the constant upgrades and improvements, the throw-away-and-replace mentality which we practise, and are exposed to, in every sphere of our lives. Every time I buy a toothbrush it has more bristles, of more colours and of more textures than the one I was able to buy 2 months before (I have a soft spot for new toothbrushes). And try buying a bar of normal, uncomplicated chocolate, in a hurry. You’ll be faced with myriad bars of all shapes that involve chocolate mixed with 20 other ingredients. Somewhere in there you may see a bar that has only been mixed with chocolate – if you’re lucky.

Children at school now have something called Forest School. About 3 years ago someone in Westminster decided that school subjects were just too boring to be taught as they were or that our children were just too lacking in attention spans to be able to cope with didactic teaching methods that had worked well for 250 years. So now our children are taught in a draughty canvas shelter in a field, 100 metres from the school building. Something about team work has been mentioned… Neither of my children, or any of the teachers, has ever been able to explain how teaching maths and English in the middle of a field works better that teaching it in the classroom.

It seems that we just can’t leave things alone or at least that we are allergic to the thought of keeping it simple and applying a little more effort. If you believe in the ideas around Maslow’s hierarchy of needs you could be forgiven for thinking that we have recently shot out of the top of the pyramid, zooming past the self-actualisation zone without a pause, onwards and higher, to the hitherto unknown: fiddle-about-and-make-things-complicated-so-that-we-don’t-have-to-deal-with-what-we-don’t-like zone.

Well, I suppose we solution-providers have played our part in feeding this hunger for the effortless solution. We have been furnishing a seemingly endless stream of ever more intriguing and comprehensive ideas, models, theories and solutions to whoever shouted for help. Solutions to things that may not have needed a new solution at all but just the original one re-applied, more consistently, more carefully, for longer. I suspect that sayings such as ’persistence pays off’ and ’if it sounds too good to be true, it is’ have a greater potential to nudge us in a constructive direction than have many serious books by clever business authors and assorted gurus.

But whilst tiny gems of wisdom such as these are quick to bring to mind, they are even easier to dismiss. And although simple they require an amount of personal investment to make them real. And it can be at this stage of personal investment that we fall. We are frail creatures, we want things to be fixed so that we can get on – with as little effort as possible. We like our solutions on a plate, not in a recipe book.

Going for the big, complicated, branded solution is the ideal meal on a plate. It looks fresh, it looks substantial and it costs enough to be good. There is little room in this thinking for the simple solution. The fact is, the simple solution is a bit embarrassing, at least in part, because it negates all that time and money that we wasted on the complicated stuff that we’ve just tried. But worse, it takes away the hiding places; no complexity and learning curve to shelter behind. Simple solutions are a tough sell not only because they lack the ‘wow’ factor but because they require immediate action which entails personal effort and even individual discomfort. And yet, self-generated improvements are like toys that don’t need batteries. There’s nothing to run out and there’s nothing to say that you can’t fix them when one of the little wheels falls off. It’s the solution you’ve always wanted and it was in your pocket all along. You know what you need to do: think ‘simple’.

What are you waiting for? Close your laptop and fix something.