The obvious value of stating the obvious

Early on in my career I learned to state the obvious. Mostly out of necessity but also partially because I lack the affliction commonly known as embarrassment.

I remember sitting in my first corporate job at Vodacom South Africa and hearing this one phrase over and over again. It sounded like missdin to my ears. Missdin. Missdin. I walked around for days wondering what the fuck it could mean but kept slipping my mind before I could find out for myself.

This being my first real job I just assumed that I was the idiot and everyone else knew what this was so I kept my mouth shut for a couple more meetings. But eventually I couldn't take it any more and finally broke and asked what the hell everyone was talking about with this damned "missdin" thing.

Turns out it's actually a MSISDN, or otherwise known as a bloody cellphone number. I was not the only person in that meeting who was relieved to finally find out that a MSISDN is actually just a mobile number for a customer. Said another way: corporate jargon to bamboozle the uninitiated. We'll circle back to this phrase shortly.

That was the moment, when I was about 22 years old, that I learned the obvious value of stating (or asking) the obvious. It's become a super-power of mine — I don't care about looking stupid, I don't mind putting my hand up to interrupt people and I don't stand on ceremony or adhere to "rules" just because they're in place when I arrive.

Steve Jobs famously said that "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you."

I take this very literally so when someone knows something I don't know, I believe I deserve to know it and ask.

In the era of AI, break-neck change, snake-oil salespeople, new hotness being declared every other day and "alternative facts" appearing throughout the world it is more important than ever to state the obvious. In an era when days feel like years and months feel like decades it's incredibly important to state the obvious when nobody else will because otherwise everything goes unchallenged and sense never checks anything.

I don't know about you but to me it feels like everywhere I turn jargon is thriving. But jargon exists purely to bamboozle the uninitiated. The latest LLM models? Bamboozle. The latest AI tool to switch to? Bamboozle. The ChatGPT image update? Bamboozle. The latest Claude finance tools? Bamboozle. The bro-tok sales speak? Bamboozle. The old-dude corporate jargon? Bamboozle.

We're in the era of jargon that exists purely to bamboozle. So don't let it.

If you don't want to update your software to the latest blah-di-blah-di-blah model, don't. Skip one. If you want to update but ignore the updates that's cool too. Do what you can but embrace the obvious because it's OK to feel like a new software update every day is obviously too much for a user to manage.

Switching AI tools and fucking with your workflow every week is obviously a stupid idea. OBVIOUSLY. But nobody wants to say it.

When a video obviously looks fake, say that and then do your own research. In crypto circles they like to say DYOR - do your own research. It's easy to state the obvious when you DYOR.

If a fact seems too "alternative" to your understanding, find out and then state the obviously true fact.

If you don't understand how something works, state the obvious, ask someone, find out asap or risk falling behind.

If something at work feels too complicated, state the obvious because it probably is.

If a transaction you're working on obviously feels fraudulent then it probably is. Say something.

There's this concept that was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 called the uncanny valley. It's the unsettling feeling humans get when something looks almost human but not quite right. Like a robot, a CGI character, or animated face that's close enough to trigger human recognition but off enough to feel deeply wrong.

I think the uncanny valley is a feeling that applies more widely but more specifically today than just robots or CGI. There's this uncanny valley of obviousness that we can feel, we can sense but we often ignore. Trump followers are going to emerge from his second term and realise they've been ignoring the obvious for a very long time. In fact, I think that Americans on both sides (it's sad that there are only two sides) are going to look back and realise that the obvious value of stating the obvious could've saved them a lot of pain and anguish over the past decade (at least).

You don't need to sound clever and you don't need to be smarter than everyone else. You just need to be comfortable stating the obvious and equally comfortable looking stupid if you're wrong.

Without fail every time I've stated the obvious thing it's turned out that it wasn't so obvious to everyone. Stating the obvious becomes valuable and relevant mostly when people stop doing it. If everyone around Elon Musk stated the obvious and told him that politics really isn't his game and he should stick to rockets and tech then we might get to Mars faster.

If everyone around Jeff Bezos stated the obvious then I bet his rockets wouldn't look like very, very erect penises.

If everyone around rich old men stated the obvious then they start dating age-appropriate partners. No, let's be honest that one will never change.

But we fall into the trap of thinking that the people who came juuuust before us or have achieved some modicum of success larger than ours have it all figured out and set the rules. They don't.

If this all sounds dreadfully familiar that's because it is and yes, the emperor is fucking naked, obviously! All of them are naked and we've been staring at them in all their "glory" hoping someone else will point it out. Yes the Kardashians are smart and successful but they're also fake, plastic and kinda icky. Sure Kanye West, or Ye, or whatever the fuck he wants us to call him these days, is a genius rapper but that's it. He's not a genius politician, he's a little racist, he's a little crazy and it's OK that we point it out. It's time we start pointing out the naked emperors that appear in our lives, our places of work and online whenever the emperor is being an asshole and claims to be fully clothed (sane).

So, in the coming week I want to challenge you to discover the obvious value of stating the obvious.

If nobody states the obvious then the obvious becomes obscure and is likely never to be seen again. Don't let that happen. There is obvious value in stating the obvious.