I woke up today with the word “effortless” playing in my mind. I love effortless conversations where you’re allowed to be fully yourself and the message still lands, without footnotes, brackets, or the need to over-explain.

Then the word “timeless” popped up. And naturally, my brain leapt to “less” and then to “less is more”. Because I toy around with words every morning when I wake up. Fifteen minutes, give or take. Then I get up and toy around with my clients’ captions. Hahah.

“Less is more.” It’s one of those phrases that gets thrown around so casually that it has almost lost its authority. It became the poster child of minimal mood boards, the default caption under beige interiors and tasteful nothingness.

And yet, the older I get in this industry, the more I realise the line survives not because it’s pretty, but because it’s true.

Less is discipline.
Less is confidence.
Less is knowing exactly what you want to say and having the courage to stop once you’ve said it.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the words timeless and effortless. They sound deceptively simple, almost lazy, as if things just happen to be that way. But nothing truly timeless ever happens by accident, and nothing genuinely effortless exists without effort first.

In advertising, we spend our days producing, presenting, adding layers, and selling the idea of more. More content, more presence, more urgency… until we forget that the campaigns we admire most are often the ones that knew when to hold back.

The lines we still quote years later weren’t pretentious or buried under paragraphs of blurb. The visuals that still feel current today didn’t lean on whatever trend was passing that quarter. They were rooted in human truth, in a sharp insight, a value that didn’t need to be refreshed every season.

Timeless work doesn’t care about trends. It doesn’t try to impress the room; it understands the room. It knows that wit travels better than volume, that clarity ages better than complexity, that restraint is remembered long after spectacle is forgotten.

When something is timeless, it moves across years and platforms without needing translation. It carries the same charge whether it appears on a billboard, a screen, or in a conversation between two people who simply remember how it made them feel.

Effortless, on the other hand, is the word we underestimate most. Effortless elegance in communication is about making things feel inevitable. It’s the result of edits that hurt a little, of ideas reduced to their sharpest form, of teams willing to remove what is good in service of what is right. Effortless brands don’t over-explain. Effortless campaigns don’t over-decorate. Effortless leaders don’t overperform. There’s confidence in work that can stand without being propped up by excess.

Timeless. Effortless. These two words remind me that the best ideas don’t scream for validation. They simply settle into culture and stay there.

So yes, less is more. Less clutter, more clarity. Less performance, more substance. Less urgency, more intention. The kind of less that takes years to learn and a certain level of self-trust to apply. The kind of less that allows something to become timeless. The kind of less that, when done right, looks completely effortless.