I have often been completely unable to find an important object such as my keys. Someone else has walked into my room and found them instantly. Often in the place where I always put keys...
Apparently I'm not the only human who makes dumb mistakes like this.
We can completely miss things in plain sight. What I've concluded is that we can also miss things in plain thought.
There are ideas that are sitting right in the front of our mind, but we fail to use them.
Uncomfortably clear
The article I wrote last week about bundling and unbundling felt very obvious to me once I had written it. Even though I discovered ideas as I wrote it, the whole thing felt too easy to understand once it was finished.
I felt unpleasantly exposed. There was this weird feeling that my thoughts were too obvious somehow.
Actually explaining things in a way that makes them obvious to the reader is important. The reader is there to understand something
They are there to feel smart.
They are not there to be confused.
Some of my favourite books were not mind-bendingly difficult to understand. In fact, by the time I finished reading them I felt the concept was blindingly obvious. Because of this, the concepts stuck with me very well.
For example:
The Four Hour Work Week
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
These books explained concepts that I was familiar with before hand. However, they popularised them by making the concepts very simple to understand.
I wasn't doing mental wizardry to comprehend what they were telling me. I was nodding along with them, thinking how I already knew everything it told me. I didn't have to close the book and try to comprehend it, my understanding was instant.
This was because they pulled concepts together the reader already knew, and they did it in an obvious way.
Basic bitches
A writer seeks to build their skills to the point they can make their ideas highly understandable. This means it should be super obvious.
The reader should be thinking, 'but of course'. As the writer you should be thinking this is too damn obvious.
We all have been told that we should be coherent and that our writing should be easy to understand. Writing this post I feel the nagging annoyance I had last week. As if I am saying that 1 + 1 = 2
Actually your writing should always do this, one plus one does actually equal two.
Your writing shouldn't be bending the rules of reality. It should be shining a light on reality.
The challenge I've faced is that I feel things which are obvious are not shareable. I make the mistake of feeling they need more complexity to be of value. I was wrong.
The obvious conclusion
This has told you something you knew - Clear writing is better writing.
It has also revealed something else you may have felt - Saying things that are obvious might make you feel dumb.
Putting one and one together, we conclude that overcoming the fear of saying things that are obvious will allow us to write things people will understand.
The ideas sitting right in the front of our mind may be the things we are looking for. We can frantically run around our heads searching for the thing that is right in front of us.
We can stop trying to find things somewhere else and go with the obvious.
Some other stuff
A pun
🐮 What do you call an obvious cow?
Predictabull*
Sorry…
A thanks
This post was very much inspired from a reply to the last post by a lovely reader David. He is the author of a brilliant newsletter - Mental Pivot. I loved this recent post he wrote about the messy and unsexy middle.
He makes some great points about our idolisation of the start and finish and how most things get very difficult in the middle.
A re-enforcing point about clarity
In the main post of this email I tried to somehow thank David and explain the thought loops I went through from his comments to my conclusion. It was in no way direct and added complexity.
It stopped one plus one equaling two.
Turns out the obvious thing was to just not put it in the main post and stop beating myself up.
A button you shouldn’t press
A warning to not drink anything before this next image
A final point to state the obvious
The obvious
Thanks for reading,
Sam
Don’t know who I am?
I thought I’d make myself obvious with a giant photo of my face.
Why are you all in my face?