I came across a Substack post the other day about something called Kidlin's Law. I didn't save who wrote it, which is a little embarrassing given what this post is about. The idea stuck with me anyway:
If you write down a problem clearly and specifically, you've already solved half of it.
Writing a problem out on paper makes you look at its parts. Once you can see the parts, the solutions get easier to find.
My first reaction was an eye roll at the word clarity. Every other post on my Instagram feed is a clarity retreat. There's a clarity coach around every corner. I have a coaching session with clarity in the name, so I'm one of them.
Clarity gets overused because it matters. You can see it in the rise of prompt engineering. A vague prompt gets a vague answer. A specific prompt gets something you can use. Either way, the person typing has to understand their own problem first.
If you can't say what your problem is, it's hard to know what your next step is.
There are shelves of books about clarity in business, in relationships, in money. So how do you teach it? How do you sell it? How do you get to the damn point?
I'm still working that out. When I work with a client on their marketing, clarity comes down to 3 questions:
What does your business need from its marketing?
Who are you trying to reach?
What do you want to say to them?
Some days I think I'm overcomplicating even that. So I tried Kidlin's Law on myself. This is my own problem, as plainly as I can write it today:
How do I serve small businesses with their digital marketing by focusing on foundational principles that still apply in a high-tech world?
I'm not sure that's the whole answer. It's simpler than where I started this week, and I'll take it.
If you want to try this, take 5 minutes this week and write your marketing problem in one sentence. Make it specific. Then read it back and see what the next step is.