Love Letter #14
Hi team,
I've been thinking lately about the underrated importance of Clarity, and the more I think about it, the more I realize how the lack of this important attribute governs every aspect of our lives. If you think about it, isn't clarity another word for simplicity, alignment, or even beauty? Life is chaotic, and isn't every effort we attempt to bring some clarity to it? And isn't peace of mind the result of achieving such clarity?
Clarity is also closely linked to language. Brené Brown wrote:
"Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don't have the language to talk about what we're experiencing, our ability to make sense of what's happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don't always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in ways that allow us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness diminishes."
Or rather, if we don't have a word for something, we don't understand it. Socrates said, " The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."
You might be thinking how this relates to work, but oh, my dear team, how NOT to work! I can think of thousands of examples of the lack of clarity we suffer from and how much it's costing us.
Leadership is about generating the positive tension that a business needs
We used to say that a work was "completed" when it was 60% complete, causing the developer (and the team, including me!) to psychologically disconnect from the work at hand.
We have account strategies that are difficult to execute and track because of the 1,000 things we need to do.
We follow certain processes that are not optimized for what is really important to the customer (internal or external)
We produce material that generates more noise instead of adding real value (the opposite of bringing clarity to the world)
And my friends, clarity is the goal. Humans are drawn to clarity and shy away from complexity. Think about the feeling of being overwhelmed: isn't that your heart and intellect screaming for some clarity? Or prioritizing! How difficult it is to prioritize when there's fog and noise. Which brings me to great moments of clarity that made everything simpler, exponentially!
When we decided that our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) was going to be larger customers and not smaller ones
When Gomez suggested that we needed to eliminate Sub-Features and replace them with jobs to be done
When we realized we were measuring the wrong metric (bugs closed) instead of bugs created
When from a financial perspective, we stop looking for 10% cost cuts in existing services or resources, and instead focus on identifying the inefficiencies that cost us tens of thousands of dollars
Now, finding clarity can be extremely difficult. But now that we have the word for it, we shouldn't be afraid to use it. We should say, "This isn't clear enough," and then embark on that clarity-seeking mission that will bring exponential growth and results. This code isn't clear enough, this specification isn't clear enough, this strategy isn't clear enough, this content is adding noise, not helping.
Very soon you’ll find that most of the time, 90% of the time, clarity is not about adding things to make them clearer, but the opposite: clarity is to take things away, to make them simpler, more elegant, tackling three, four, five needs with a single concept. Lack of clarity happens when we grow fast, when we don’t have time to think or raise our heads. I am fully responsible for this, but I write you here to ask you to look things through this angle, and help me make sure that we, as a company, seek the clarity on things. You know you need clarity when you are feeling overwhelmed. That is the perfect moment to stop what you are doing, step back, perhaps even ask your manager, and seek the light that will help you have a bigger impact by doing less, to give more power to your single punch.