Hidden assets
Lately I’ve been spending the best slices of each day with a friend of mine. She has deep fascinations, a quick laugh, and a short temper that sometimes make me think we’re separated at birth. But it can’t be, because I met her mom last year just before her fourth birthday. K told me she loved me in a candy store on the day we met and we’ve been sugar-tooth buddies ever since.
Now in kindergarten, my girlfriend’s daughter has started to notice that she’s the shortest kid in class. Other kids say stuff. It’s not necessarily mean, but it’s loaded; being tall is closer to being older, and being older is better. A classmate’s mom — who has no idea how lucky she was that I wasn’t there — recently said something that K overheard. The whole thing has caught me off-guard because her height is the tiniest part of how I think about her. She’s a tornado of love and fire whether she’s 3’3” or 6’3”. In my world she’s enormous.
I was recently watching a video of some Hawaiian professional surfers talk to their surfboard shaper, Jon Pyzel. They’re telling him how they process whether a board is going to be good before even riding it. Everyone who surfs understands the “under arm test” — picking up a board in a surf shop to gauge whether it will be good. They’re going into the intricacies of board’s weight and the feel of the rails. He gently dismantles the utility of their take (neglecting to get into what shapers will tell you, that rocker, or curve from nose to tail, is the single most important factor):
“You just described the two senses that you get to use, the two things that you get to judge a board by. One hand on the rail, and the weight of it. That’s pretty much all you got. Sure you could see something that looks really ugly… but those are the two things that 99% of people judge their board by.”
Gaining deep understanding of everything we do would be paralyzing, so we use shorthands. But deep expertise can be paralyzing too.
I’ve been reading HBS professor Youngme Moon’s 2010 book Different. It’s a fun read with references that feel refreshingly non-topical, like MySpace, next to timeless takes on escaping competition. One of her frames is outside-in versus inside-out thinking. “(Product marketers) are too busy experiencing the category from the inside out. When I visited the folks at VOSS, it was a bit of a shock to discover that they earnestly believe their water tastes better than that of their competitors.”
Though those VOSS folks would be pleased that TikTok’s favorite water sommelier Martin Reise approves, one might find it hard to get regular people to care about the difference.
In Think Again, Adam Grant says “Sociologist Murray Davis argues that when ideas survive, it’s not because they’re true — it’s because they’re interesting.”
In financial terms, brands are collections of assets. They are buckets of true things that can be put to use for competitive advantage. But like VOSS’s (oxymoronic?) tasty water, just because they’re true, doesn’t mean they’re interesting. Every asset has different present and future value.
I loved Andy Nairn’s Go Luck Yourself. In it he writes, “As any good therapist knows, its all about asking the right questions and seeing where the conversation takes you. The deeper you dig the more likely you are to find something really interesting.”
K has assets hidden within her that we’ve yet to experience and some that have shown promise. She wants to be an animal doctor, and her love for and knowledge of animals are staggering. She has an artistic eye and a look-twice-jump-high brand of fearlessness. She makes friends and makes up new games with speed and fluency. Who knows where those will coalesce or what else she’ll take to.
Valuable assets don’t always make themselves obvious. They’re hidden behind cheap shorthands, best practices and inside-out thinking. The good stuff is coyly waiting for an incisive question to coax it out.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
