“If you look around and think things don’t make sense, don’t necessarily assume that the way they’re being done is the right way. There’s a surprisingly high chance you’re right, and things are wrong.” – me, in a letter of advice to myself when leaving my first job
A while back I was asked to help a business trying to hire their first growth marketer. This was a Series A company that had just accepted $X million in funding (over 1, under 10), and the cofounder wanted to see if I knew anyone.
Do I know anyone? Maybe, I know bunches of people, but first I needed to know what exactly he was looking for. This, basically, was our conversation:
Me: What are you looking for in this role?
Him: I need someone who can do a little bit of everything based on the opportunities they find, but definitely content and partnerships, and also maybe some sort of copywriting and product-led growth.
Me: Ok, so it sounds like what you need is someone who’s going to be scrappy and find the path that makes sense, and you think probably that path is going to emphasize content marketing and partnerships. Product-led growth and copywriting are nice-to-haves.
Him: Omg yes! Exactly. It’s like you just wrote the job description.
I didn’t write anything. I asked questions and then summarized the responses. If anything, he wrote the job description.
The other guy in this conversation was smart (very, very smart). But because he hadn’t yet sat down and tried to articulate what he was looking for in words, what he had was relatively unformed notions about what was and was not important.
I provided a service: forcing him to articulate those thoughts.
Once thoughts are in the open air, they become less nebulous and gloopy and can solidify into a clear list of priorities. This is surprisingly common. It’s also surprisingly effective and surprisingly valuable.
Now that I’ve been at a company for a while, I have a hand (or at least a pinky) in most of the marketing. That means people come to me with their projects, whether or not I know much about their expertise, and ask questions. Sometimes I have answers, but most of the time I’m sitting there thinking “you know I’m not like smarter or better at this than you, right?”
All I do is ask questions and summarize the answers. People seem to leave with more clarity, and it’s clarity they gave themselves.
This is Obvious as a Service (OaaS).
The most important things are so obvious that they stop being obvious
“The person who can do the average thing when everyone else around them is losing their mind.” – Napoleon’s definition of a military genius
The best thing you could do for your physical health, your mental health, and your career is get an extra hour of sleep every night.
This is so obvious that it fades into the background. Everyone knows that they feel worse when they haven’t slept, and there’s a literal mountain of research on how sleep affects mood, appetite, performance (even free throw percentage. Someone tell Luka Doncic.). And yet stuff from the day creeps into the night and between 30% and 60% of adults (depending on the study) sleep less than 7 hours a night.
In any situation there are hundreds of factors, but only a handful of factors that are the most important. When you’re in a situation, it’s hard to distinguish the two. Problems, fires, opportunities, and just stuff pop up left and right. It’s easy to get stuck on the hamster wheel, which makes it harder to focus on what’s important and make decisions.
That’s where Obvious as a Service (OaaS) comes in. Someone outside the situation isn’t caught up in the minutiae or day-to-day incentives, and even when they don’t have all the context can more easily ask the right questions. This is why we all have friends who give amazing advice but aren’t great at taking their own advice. I have at times been one of these friends.
Obvious is a weird word. Is it pejorative? Does it feel like “well that’s so obvious, how could you not know that?”
What makes Obvious as a Service valuable is that everyone needs it (including you, including me). As David Foster Wallace said in his famous commencement speech at Kenyon College, “this is water” — the world is around us all the time, but we aren’t always paying attention to it.
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?...”
David Foster Wallace:
“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
Smart people have this problem. How can you get to the heart of the obvious, not-obvious, important things?
I don’t have a standard list of questions that I ask, but at the core I am trying to understand what is going on here.
What are the moving parts? What are the different pieces in play?
Why now? What’s immediately happening that makes this important?
Who is involved? Who cares about this? Who is it for?
How do you feel about it?
What does an ideal state look like 3 months from now? 6 months? A year?
The most useful questions are follow-ups, but you have to start somewhere.
The most important part of Obvious as a Service is that the person you’re helping knows more about their problem than you do. They may already have the answer and need help vocalizing and working through it, or they may need more information (but they need help vocalizing what that information is and how to get it).
In either case, the goal isn’t to share your ideas. You're helping them think through their own ideas, based on their own rich knowledge of the situation.
Once you’ve gotten to the obvious, you summarize what they’ve said back to you (remember, summarizing is a superpower). Then they say “yes! That’s exactly it, thank you so much” and you think “happy to help, but you really did all the hard work.”
You can service yourself (no not like... *sigh* ... just keep reading)
If you get good at Obvious as a Service, you can lull yourself into thinking that you don’t need the service yourself.
You do.
Part of what makes Obvious as a Service so useful is the outside perspective. When you’re locked into a problem, it’s harder to think outside of your initial assumptions. You wind up cycling through the same logic over and over, even if that logic is bad.
The “incubation effect” is the idea that stepping away from a problem can lead to sudden flashes of insight. From this paper on creativity:
“Anecdotal accounts of creative individuals suggest that oftentimes, creative discoveries result from a process whereby initial conscious thought is followed by a period during which one refrains from task-related conscious thought. For example, one may spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about a problem when the solution suddenly pops into consciousness while taking a shower. Not only creative individuals but also traditional theories of creativity have put a lot of emphasis on this incubation stage in creative thinking.”
More recently, some have argued that the incubation effect isn’t caused by unconsciously solving the problem — it happens because stepping away from a problem lets you break out of your logic loops and notice other parts of your situation.
Another way to accomplish that? Friends and mentors. Find people who can do OaaS for you because they aren’t in your situation. Mentors are great because they have seen situations like yours and understand them. Friends are great because they understand you.
What if you can’t just dial someone up every time you have a problem?
Part of OaaS is the outside perspective. The other part is that you haven’t fully mapped out your own thoughts. Almost everything that comes from OaaS ultimately comes from the person with the problem — in this case, that’s you — which means the answer is in there and you just have to get it out.
So try writing about it.
Writing is powerful because it forces you to put words to abstract ideas, which makes it easier to think through the tangle and find connections.
Journaling, Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” — there are lots of writing exercises people use. Psychologist James Pennebaker, creator of writing therapy, has shown that just 15 minutes of writing for 4 consecutive days literally made people healthier for months.
These are the instructions used in his expressive writing therapy research:
“For the next 4 days, I would like you to write your very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your entire life or an extremely important emotional issue that has affected you and your life. In your writing, I'd like you to really let go and explore your deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie your topic to your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends or relatives; to your past, your present or your future; or to who you have been, who you would like to be or who you are now. You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or about different topics each day. All of your writing will be completely confidential.
Don't worry about spelling, grammar or sentence structure. The only rule is that once you begin writing, you continue until the time is up.”
Replace “most traumatic experience of your entire life” with the problem you are experiencing at the moment.
The most important part of this exercise is that it is freeform — when I do it, I try to keep the pen always moving (no pauses), even if that means spitting out some gibberish.
You’ll be surprised at how much clearer your thinking is afterwards. The opening quote of this piece comes from just such a writing exercise, and the letter than came from it helped me in the moment and when I look back at it today.