Rather than staring at the things in front of you, it’s sometimes better to step back and ask yourself what is missing in order to understand what happened. Sometimes, the things that you can directly see and hear simply don’t add up.

My favorite illustration of this process involves one of Charles Darwin’s epiphanies:

On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the ‘Philosophical Magazine’ (‘Philosophical Magazine,’ 1842.), a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.

Sometimes it takes the first person to recognize a two-step process and only then does it become always obvious for everyone who follows. Sometimes the person who first “gets it” is you. You might have tried to figure something out for a month or more before you finally saw it for what it was. And then, of course, it’s obvious for you and for everyone else you mention it to, whether it be a puzzle solution, how to make your software do a task or figuring out a person’s secret motivation.

“The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.”
Khalil Gibran

Because I work as a trial lawyer, this also reminds me that many people assume that circumstantial evidence is “second rate” evidence; that it is not as persuasive as the things and events that people observe directly. There is no basis for believing this. Some circumstantial evidence is sometimes much more persuasive than some direct evidence. A well-known example of powerful circumstantial evidence is a “smoking gun.” Circumstantial evidence is often sufficient to convict a criminal defendant even when the burden of proof for guilt is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” A multi-step puzzle involving circumstantial evidence can evoke such an “A-ha!” moment that it can even leave you no doubt at all.

If you want a great example of how something can suddenly become obvious, go to Andy Clark’s Edge video on Predictive Processing, Minute 11:30, and listen to the sine wave speech pattern examples. It will hit you like a ton of bricks. The entire lecture is phenomenal, but the examples will only take a couple minutes and it’s worth your while.

The (obvious) take-away: Don’t give up, even where the solution is not obvious.