My late father, Engineer Ombogo, always advised me:

“It is easy to make money. Find people’s problems, especially HNWI guys, and fix them.”

😅

That was how he spoke. A complicated piece of wisdom compressed into one short sentence, then handed to you as though the rest should be obvious.

But that is the beauty of wisdom and knowledge.

A sentence like that can take an entire textbook to understand. Sometimes it takes years of living before you realise you still have not understood it.

Find people’s problems and fix them.

Simple.

Except most of us do not naturally look at problems and see opportunities. We look at problems and see problems.

How many people look at stock exchange graphs turning red and ask themselves, what has broken here, and is there something useful I could fix?

Most people see fear. Loss. Risk. A reason to retreat.

How many look at the current supply chain disruptions and think, gee, I could fix that?

We see shortages. Delayed vessels. Export restrictions. Uncertain payment terms. Sellers who cannot deliver. Buyers who cannot pay. Documentation that does not match the transaction. Entire industries struggling to obtain the materials they need.

The obvious response is gloom.

Everything is difficult.

Everything is expensive.

Nobody can be trusted.

The market is collapsing.

The swindlers, of course, see opportunity immediately. Unfortunately, the problem they choose to solve is how to separate frightened people from their money.

They understand something the rest of us often forget. Disorder creates openings.

A shortage creates desperation.

Confusion creates information gaps.

A broken process creates people willing to pay anyone who claims they can repair it.

The swindler asks, how can I exploit this?

The entrepreneur is supposed to ask, how can I actually fix it?

That sounds noble when written plainly. In practice, I am not sure most rational people think that way.

Most of us would rather sit at a safe distance and explain the gloom. We analyse why the system is broken. We share graphs showing how badly it is broken. We discuss the people responsible for breaking it. We become extremely informed about the impossibility of doing anything.

I am not any different.

Even with the wisdom of my late father, I keep having to remind myself to look for the opportunity.

Not the imaginary opportunity. Not optimism for the sake of optimism. Not pretending a falling market is secretly wonderful or that every crisis is waiting to make me rich.

The actual opportunity.

Who has a real problem?

How painful is it?

What have they already tried?

Why has nobody solved it?

Do I understand the problem well enough to be useful?

Can I fix it at a cost that leaves value for both of us?

Those questions are harder than saying, “Find a problem and fix it.”

Sometimes the problem is visible but far beyond your ability. Sometimes it belongs to people who do not have the money to pay for a solution. Sometimes the person complaining is not sufficiently bothered to change anything. Sometimes what looks like a market failure is a regulatory, political or infrastructure problem that one clever person cannot simply code around.

And sometimes the opportunity is right there, but you cannot see it because you are standing inside the same fear as everyone else.

That may be the real difference.

The problem is rarely hidden. Everyone can see the red graph. Everyone can see the shortage. Everyone can see the delayed cargo, the abandoned customer, the inefficient process or the company losing money.

What is hidden is the useful question.

What can be repaired here?

Perhaps that was what my father understood.

Making money may be easy in principle because people will always have problems. The difficult part is training yourself to see a problem without becoming consumed by it. To understand the pain clearly enough that you can build something useful instead of merely joining the conversation about how terrible everything has become.

And then, of course, you still have to act.

You have to choose one problem. Learn it. Risk being wrong. Build the solution. Find the person who needs it. Explain why it matters. Ask them to pay. Discover that your first solution does not quite work. Fix it again.

A whole textbook inside one sentence.

Today, as I look at markets turning red, supply chains shifting and entire industries trying to work around disruption, I keep hearing my father’s advice.

The question is not whether problems exist.

The question I am asking myself is whether I am finding the opportunities inside them.