“Stuff” is one of my favorite words to use—especially in a corporate setting.
I love using the word “stuff” not because I don’t know what I’m describing, but because it dismantles pretentiousness. It cuts through professional jargon. It humanizes whatever we’re actually talking about.
(“Thing” is a great word too, by the way.)
Jargon
Of course, you have to use “stuff” strategically. You can’t just stuff “stuff” into everything you say.
For me, I reserve it for big topics—foundational ideas hidden behind walls of jargon. Usually, the bigger something sounds, the more it’s built on jargon.
That’s the thing not everyone really understands—but most pretend to. That’s the thing people DM each other about after the meeting, quietly asking, “Hey… what was that again?”
That’s the pretentious thing we have to dismantle. That’s the thing I target with the word “stuff.”
A Design System is...
Take design systems, for example. (My supposed area of expertise.)
There are projects, teams, products, companies, books, and conferences built around it. I asked ChatGPT to give me a typical definition of a design system.
Here's the (eventual) one paragraph version:
A design system in SaaS product design is a centralized, documented collection of reusable components, visual styles, guidelines, and code that ensures consistency, efficiency, and scalability across a product. It includes things like color palettes, typography, spacing, UI components (like buttons and modals), and usage rules that help designers and developers work faster without reinventing patterns. Instead of every team building their own version of a feature, they pull from a shared source of truth, making the product feel cohesive to users and easier to maintain and evolve over time.
Fair enough. Not wrong. Just… a lot.
It’s packed with words that sound impressive—“reusable components,” “scalability,” “shared source of truth”—but aren’t always clear to the people who actually need to work with them. “Tokens,” by the way, is usually where people get lost.
(Time to bring out the “Stuff” axe.)
If you asked me what a design system is, I’d say:
A way to make stuff that looks like all your other stuff, using the stuff you already have.
That’s it.
Tokens are just tools. Colors and typography are mediums. All important. But they’re parts—not principles. They make up the thing, but not what the thing is as a whole.
Simplify
Of course, simplifying something complicated takes practice. Real, intentional, daily practice. It’s something I work on all the time.
This video on explaining complex ideas helped crystallize it for me.
(There are a lot of sources for this idea—this just happened to be the one that clicked.)
Here are some notes I captured from it:
- We get stuck in our own heads. We forget how it feels to hear something for the first time.
- Simplify. Simplify far beyond where you think you’ve simplified enough.
- Focus on the results and benefits. How does this help people?
- Focus on the problem. What problem does this solve—not just what features it has?
- Practice. When you think you’ve practiced enough, practice 10 more times.
It’s like that old (real) Einstein quote:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Smarten up
The next time you encounter something big, scary, and wrapped in jargon, try this:
See if you—or someone else (or ChatGPT)—can explain it simply. Because really, at the end of the day, it’s all just stuff.
And at the end of the day, you’re not dumbing it down. You’re smartening it up.
P.S. "Stuff" is also one of my favorite George Carlin stand-up bits.