Admitting What Is Obvious

This week we refocused Every around one big question: “What comes next?” It’s a powerful thing to organize a company around a core question. In order to answer that question for Every, I first had to answer it for myself. I needed to know: Who am I? What do I really want to do with my life? It was almost exactly a year ago that I realized I wanted to be a writer. Everything that has happened since at Every has come from understanding that truth about myself. It seems obvious in hindsight, but sometimes the most obvious truths are hidden from view. This piece chronicles my journey to that realization, and it seemed like an appropriate time to bring it back. I hope admitting what is obvious helps you as much as it has helped me.—Dan Shipper

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Ignoring what is obvious incurs a huge cost.

It requires you to go about your day numbing yourself to the reality of who you are and what you want—which is a waste of time for you and everyone around you.

By contrast, admitting what is obvious is freeing and motivating. But it’s terrifying to do it. Sometimes the most obvious truths about ourselves are hard to see because the consequences of those truths seem so dire. 

This happened to me recently. I admitted a truth that was probably obvious to everyone around me, but not to myself: I’m a writer. This sounds so obvious that it feels like it is a joke. I write a weekly column at a newsletter that I started—of course I’m a writer.

But this is one of those truths for me. And I’m glad I can admit it.

If there are obvious truths like this for you, you should find them, and admit them, too.

Why you can’t admit the obvious

The poet Robert Bly wrote that we all lug an invisible bag around with us everywhere we go. We’ve been filling it since childhood with the parts of ourselves that are true to us—to how we feel and what we want—but that aren’t acceptable to the people around us. 

It starts with our parents: “don’t make noise during dinner,” or “in this family, we play baseball.” It continues with our teachers: “you’d be good at math if you only applied yourself.” Finally, it starts to come from peers in high school: “that’s nerdy,” or “you’ll never have a career doing that.”

Each of these interactions causes us to put parts of ourselves in the bag. And the things we put in the bag are the obvious truths that we can’t admit, and that we try to ignore.

Being a writer is one of the things I tried to put in my invisible bag. For a long time, admitting that I am a writer and that I want to be a writer felt like it would force me to shed my identity as a founder, eliminate the possibility of building a consequential company, and seriously cap my potential career earnings.

So, I pretended to be a founder who also liked to write. 

The first clue that I wanted to be a writer was that, after I sold my last business—a B2B software business—instead of going back into software, I started Every. 

Every is a startup, so it lets me call myself founder. But on the inside, it also secretly lets me do the thing that I really wanted to do but couldn’t admit to myself or anyone else: be a writer.