Our customers don’t get us because we focus on the wrong thing.
Have you ever done one of those logic puzzles that was impossible until your figured it out and then it was annoyingly easy and obvious? How about tapping out the rhythm of a song? In your head, the song is so obvious, it can be frustrating that no one else can pick it up. These things happen because we have an incredible amount of context that we aren’t consciously tracking.
Once we find the solution, we no longer see the problem. At least, I can say this happens to me way more frequently than I realize. It’s just like once you see the hidden face in the painting, you can no longer unsee it. Ukranian artist, Oleg Shupliak specializes in these kinds of paintings. Here’s his Claude Monet.
The same thing is true in business. Our customers don’t have the context we have. The solution is explicitly obvious to us – to the point that it doesn’t even make sense that we need to explain it. It is still hidden to almost everyone else. Most of us are looking at the landscape, the girls’ umbrellas, and the clouds. There isn’t always time or energy to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
All of us see the world slightly differently. Our perspectives have to be different as we cannot exist in the same spot in time and space! We are all tuned in to different wavelengths of perspective. What is obvious to you might me completely hidden to me and almost definitely is hidden to your customers. In fact, they are hiring you because they haven’t figured it out yet!
Thanks to Kieran Wood for the puzzle photo and to Oleg Shupliak for the cool portrait of Monet.