People Tell You Their Problems

I was having a conversation with my brother-in-law about business success. "You just gotta be really lucky," he said. He meant it in all the usual ways - lucky to have money, lucky to have connections, lucky to spot the right opportunity.

I've been thinking about that conversation a lot lately, because it captures what most people believe about business success. We love to mythologize it. We talk about visionaries, geniuses, lucky breaks, and being in the right place at the right time. We imagine successful entrepreneurs having some superhuman ability to see the invisible or predict the future.

But I know a lot of successful founders, and I've noticed something strange. None of them were struck by brilliant insights out of nowhere. None of them needed extraordinary luck to be successful (though luck has often played a role in the ultimate magnitude of their success). Instead, they all seem to share one simple trait: they listen intently to what people are actually saying.

That might sound trivial. But instead of trying to predict the future or invent something revolutionary, successful founders just pay attention to the problems people are literally speaking out loud.

And people love to talk about what they need. Out loud. With words. All the time.

The most reliable path to success is simply listening and then doing something about it.

Take DoorDash. The signals were everywhere in the restaurant industry. Restaurant owners were literally saying "I'm losing business because I can't offer delivery" and "I can't afford full-time drivers." Customers were explicitly asking "Why doesn't this place deliver?" The problem wasn't hidden - it was being spoken out loud by both sides every single day. Some restaurants even had "No Delivery" signs - literally advertising the problem to anyone paying attention! While the status quo remained unchanged for years, the opportunity was sitting there in plain sight, being vocally expressed by both restaurants and customers.

Or look at Linear. Every engineering team in tech was openly complaining about how much they hated Jira. It wasn't subtle - it was a constant, vocal stream of frustration. "Jira is so slow." "Why does it take 10 clicks to do anything?" "I spend more time fighting with Jira than actually tracking our work." While others were trying to revolutionize the future of work, Linear just listened to what engineers were already saying and built the tool they were desperately asking for.

The crazy thing about these opportunities is that they did not require genius-level intelligence or extraordinary luck to spot. They just required something that turns out to be surprisingly rare - actually paying attention when people tell you what they need.

This principle works everywhere in business. Investors will literally tell you what they need. "We need to write bigger checks" or "We're trying to establish ourselves in this space." Potential employees will tell you what would make them join. Customers will tell you what's frustrating them.

The signals aren't hidden. The doors aren't locked. People are pointing at open doors every day saying "Hey, someone should really do something about this!"

But we're all too busy trying to be clever, trying to predict the future, or trying to invent something revolutionary. We've convinced ourselves that success must be more complicated than just listening and then actually doing something about what we hear.

It turns out that while luck might determine the magnitude of your success, and intelligence might help you execute the solution, the real key to consistent business success is embarrassingly simple.

People will tell you their problems. You just have to listen.