Practicing legibility

If you’ve even been told, more than once, that you’re “too hard to read”, this is a bug, not a feature. You have a legibility problem.

While there are instances where keeping cards close to your chest is the strategy to win against opponents, most of us are not professional poker players, secret spies or in special ops. My guess is that more often than not, we would benefit much more from making friends than enemies.

So in most instances, we should really make it our duty to be stupidly simple and easy for people to understand. No silly mind games, no forcing others to jump through mental hoops or making them use extra brain power to infer the meaning behind something. Ambiguity is a burden to others. Your inability to be clear, honest and direct creates extra cognitive work for others.

So the kind and generous thing to do is to make yourself as legible as possible to others.

But what do I mean by 'legible'? Legibility simply means how easily something can be read or understood. We usually use the word literally: neat handwriting is legible because you don’t have to squint at the page trying to decipher what someone wrote. But the same idea can be applied more broadly. Something is legible when you don’t have to work very hard to understand what it means.

People can be legible too.

A legible person makes it relatively easy for others to understand who they are, what they think, what they feel, what they want, and what they care about. Their external signals reasonably match their internal state.

Practicing legibility, then, is the practice of closing the gap between the two. It sounds like common sense, because it is. Why wouldn't you want others to understand and appreciate you? But it's also much easier said than done, and many of us, are not actually as great at being legible as we think.

Legibility done well requires two main things: (1) a willingness to confront yourself deeply enough to figure out what is actually true, (2) a willingness to then fully expose yourself and be vulnerable.

In business, if you're trying to sell a product or service, there is an understanding that the onus is on the seller to communicate clearly what they do and the problem they can solve for you. If a potential customer doesn't understand what you're selling, you don't blame the customer for not "getting it." You go back and make the message clearer.

For job seekers in the market right now, it's your responsibility to make it stupidly easy for someone to understand what you're good at, what problems you can solve, and why they should hire you. A hiring manager shouldn't have to study your resume and piece together the story themselves.

In dating, if you have interest or like someone, for the love of God, don't be cruel and make them decipher whether you like them. Tell them, show them, make it obvious enough that a reasonable person couldn't mistake it for indifference.

The throughline in all these examples is exposure. Being clear means making a claim about yourself, what you want, or what you believe, and tolerating the possibility that you may be rejected for being true to yourself. That exposure can be uncomfortable. But ambiguity doesn't eliminate the discomfort; it just pushes the work of figuring you out onto someone else.

The good thing is that you can practice and improve your legibility in small, ordinary ways.

Writing my resume has been an exercise in legibility. So has writing my bio and building my personal website. Each forces me to confront the same questions: Who am I? What am I actually good at? What do I care about? What am I trying to do? And can I communicate the answer simply enough that someone else understands it?

In speech, practicing legibility looks like less over-explaining or circling around the thing I'm actually trying to say. Just say the core thing in fewer words: "I want this", "I prefer this". This is surprisingly difficult. Sometimes all the extra words are there because you haven't discovered the core idea yet, or because you're using it as a safety blanket.

But strip it all away. What is actually true? What is the main thing you are trying to say? Say just that and nothing else. It's the kind thing to do for others and yourself.