highlights
18 highlights saved, filed under marketing.
- 01
The trouble is, the obvious is apt to be so simple and commonplace that it has no appeal to the imagination.
- 02
THE FIRST TEST OF OBVIOUSNESS I borrowed from Kettering of General Motors, who had it placed on the wall of the General Motors Research Building in Dayton: This problem when solved will be simple.
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THE SECOND TEST OF OBVIOUSNESS is a question: Does it check with human nature?
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THE THIRD TEST OF OBVIOUSNESS is: Put it on paper. Write out your idea, plan or project in words of one or two syllables, as though you were explaining it to a child.
- 05
Can you do this in two or three short paragraphs, so that it makes sense? If not, if the explanation becomes long, involved, ingenious — then very likely it is not obvious. For, to repeat, “When you find the answer it will be simple.”
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THE FOURTH TEST OF OBVIOUSNESS is: Does it EXPLODE in people’s minds?
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If an idea or proposal does not “explode,” if it requires lengthy explanation, and involves hours of argument, either it is not obvious, or you have not thought it through yourself and reduced it to obvious simplicity.
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THE FIFTH TEST OF OBVIOUSNESS is: Is the time ripe? Many ideas and plans are obvious in themselves, but just as obviously “out of time.”
- 09
To be ready is to be timely; and to be timely is an obvious requirement.
- 10
It is wise because it is obvious to do so, and obvious because it is wise to protect ourselves from our propensity to convince ourselves too easily that our ideas are good.
- 11
Never mind how a thing has always been done, or how other people want to do it. What is the simplest possible way of doing it?
- 12
There is a perfectly mechanical way of simplifying a plan or project, or of analyzing an idea to test its simplicity. List on a sheet of paper every part of it. As you write each element or factor, apply the test question: Is this element or factor absolutely necessary?
- 13
2. Suppose the whole thing were to be completely reversed?
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Can a vote be taken on it, or the public’s help actively enlisted?
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What opportunity is being overlooked because no one has bothered to develop it?
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What are the special needs of the situation?
- 17
Professor Zueblin is right when he says that thinking is the hardest work many people ever have to do, and they don’t like to do any more of it than they can help.
- 18
“Study most of the men who are getting salaries of upward of one hundred thousand dollars a year. They are nearly all doers of the obvious.