Choose One Useful Problem Before You Decide What To Sell
Your experience becomes valuable when it helps make somebody else’s problem easier.
Start With Their Friction, Not Your Filing Cabinet Of Knowledge
The problem tells you which piece of your experience is worth bringing to the bench.
Choose One Useful Problem Small Enough To Solve Properly
You do not need to package your whole life. You need one useful result another person can recognise.
Experienced people are almost invited to make a particular mistake when somebody tells them they could earn online from what they know. They sit down with a cup of tea, look back across forty or fifty years of work, family life, hobbies, mistakes, victories and assorted bits of practical wisdom, and immediately ask themselves the biggest question possible: “What could I sell from all that?” It sounds sensible. It is also enough to make a perfectly capable person shut the laptop again before the tea has gone cold. A lifetime is not a product brief. It is a warehouse. Somewhere inside may be dozens of useful little solutions, but standing at the entrance shouting “What shall I turn all this into?” is rather like walking into B&Q and asking which item in the entire building you ought to buy. We need a smaller question.
That is why the mantra sitting above today’s work matters: Money Comes From Solving Problems For Other People. Notice what it does not say. It does not say money comes from having the longest CV, the biggest collection of certificates, the cleverest AI tool, or the most impressive pile of knowledge. Knowledge matters, of course, but knowledge sitting inside your head is inventory. It becomes useful when another person has a difficulty, and some part of what you know helps reduce it. Confusion becomes clearer. A mistake becomes easier to avoid. A job takes less time. A decision becomes safer. A beginner stops staring at six choices and finally knows which one to try first. That is where experience stops being history and starts becoming value.
The Problem Chooses Which Experience Comes Off The Shelf
Take an old heating engineer. Ask him what he knows, and you may get forty years of material before breakfast. Boilers. Pumps. Radiators. Controls. Water treatment. Pipe sizes. Fault finding. Quoting. Customers. Apprentices. Suppliers. Bad installations. Good installations. Jobs that should have taken two hours and somehow became a three-day siege involving a floorboard, a dog, and a compression fitting last seen rolling towards the skirting board. All of that experience is real. None of it, by itself, tells him what digital product to make. Then somebody asks, “Why is one radiator cold when all the others are hot?” Suddenly the warehouse becomes useful. The problem has walked in carrying a shopping list.
The engineer no longer needs to explain everything he knows about heating. He only needs the small part of that knowledge that helps somebody understand this particular problem. The useful answer is a simple sequence of checks. It may become a homeowner checklist explaining what they can safely notice before calling a professional. It may be a short guide to describing the symptoms clearly so an engineer arrives with better information.
The format can come later. The important shift is that the problem has chosen the relevant experience. Instead of squeezing forty years into a product, we pull one useful drawer open because somebody actually needs what is inside.
That is the first reason to Choose One Useful Problem. It gives your experience a job. Without the problem, you are selecting knowledge because it feels important to you. With the problem, you select knowledge because it helps produce a useful result for somebody else.
Repeated Questions Are Little Flags Stuck In The Ground
If you are wondering where these problems are hiding, don’t start by searching the internet for “100 profitable niches for retirees.” Begin with your own history. Think about the questions that have followed you around. What did customers ask? What did new workers ask? What do friends still ring you about? What does the family say, “Ask him, he knows about that,” or “She’ll know what to do”? Those repeated questions are not automatic proof that somebody will pay. We should never pretend they are. But they are clues that your knowledge overlaps with someone else’s uncertainty, and that is a far more promising place to start than inventing a product first and hoping a problem appears later.
A retired administrator might remember people constantly asking how she kept paperwork organised. A gardener might repeatedly be asked why seedlings fail. A former shop owner might be the person friends ask when they cannot work out what to charge. A keen caravan owner might get questions about what to check before a first long trip. A grandmother who has organised family affairs for years might be the person everyone turns to when important documents need finding. None of these people has to declare themselves an expert guru. They need to identify where others experience friction and learn how to reduce it.
There is a useful sentence to complete here: “People keep asking me how to…” Do not polish it. Do not make it sound marketable. Write the real questions. “People keep asking me how to organise all the household paperwork.” “People keep asking me how to know which old tools are worth keeping.” “People keep asking me how to start using AI without getting overwhelmed.” “People keep asking me how I decide what to write about every day.” Those sentences contain more commercial information than a fancy product name because they start with a recognisable struggle rather than a container we are desperate to fill.
And this is the part I particularly like about making this the first exercise of the new journey. We are not beginning with technology. We are not beginning with “how to make money online.” We are not asking a retiree to learn six tools before they have a reason to use any of them. We start where they already have an advantage: lived experience. Then we turn that experience around and look at it from the perspective of another human being who is stuck. That keeps the whole system human-led from the start. AI can help us organise ideas, test wording, create graphics, build pages and multiply content later, but AI does not decide which problems we care enough to solve. That judgment stays with the person.
It also changes the meaning of the money. The seven-pound sale we have discussed is not the objective, because seven pounds is a magnificent financial achievement. It matters because it would represent a small exchange of value: “You had a problem. I knew something useful. I packaged the relevant part so you could use it. You decided it was worth paying for.” That is a much healthier foundation for the journey than chasing a commission before we have decided who we are helping or why.
So keep today’s mantra above the bench: Money Comes From Solving Problems For Other People
And underneath it, today’s working job: CHOOSE ONE USEFUL PROBLEM
Before finishing, check your work against five simple Choose One Useful Problem questions. Can you name the person? Can you describe the problem without mentioning your future product? Can you explain where they get stuck? Can you identify which part of your experience might help? Can you describe one small useful improvement they could reasonably achieve?
If those five answers are clear, stop.
Do not write the ebook tonight.
Do not build the course.
Do not order the imaginary brass plaque for your new digital empire.
You have completed today’s job.
The Apprentice Carry-Forward
Save three things before you leave the workshop: the person, the problem, and the smallest useful change. Those three pieces become tomorrow’s raw material. The problem tells us what needs fixing. The useful change begins telling us what the solution must accomplish. Only then can we decide what the first small product should actually do.
Open to See This Video, And This Is What’s Already Built, Trained & Waiting For Your First Command.
Today’s Apprentice Task: Build One Front Door
APPRENTICE CTA: DO THE JOB TODAY: PERSON → PROBLEM → FRICTION → USEFUL CHANGE
Write it down. Keep it small. Carry it forward.
The new journey does not begin by asking, “What can I sell?”
It begins with a better question:
“Whose problem can something I already know help make easier?”
Answer that properly, and tomorrow we can decide what useful result the first solution should create.
Next Job: Choose One Useful Result.
Choose One Useful Problem Before Building A Product
Choose One Useful Problem Before Building A Product: Choose One Useful Problem Before You Decide What To Sell
Your experience becomes valuable when it helps make somebody else’s problem easier.
Start With Their Friction, Not Your Filing Cabinet Of Knowledge
The problem tells you which piece of your experience is worth bringing to the bench.
Take an old heating engineer. Ask him what he knows, and you may get forty years of material before breakfast. Boilers. Pumps. Radiators. Controls. Water treatment. Pipe sizes. Fault finding. Quoting. Customers. Apprentices. Suppliers. Bad installations. Good installations. Jobs that should have taken two hours and somehow became a three-day siege involving a floorboard, a dog, and a compression fitting last seen rolling towards the skirting board. All of that experience is real. None of it, by itself, tells him what digital product to make. Then somebody asks, “Why is one radiator cold when all the others are hot?” Suddenly the warehouse becomes useful. The problem has walked in carrying a shopping list.
Take an old heating engineer. Ask him what he knows, and you may get forty years of material before breakfast. Boilers. Pumps. Radiators. Controls. Water treatment. Pipe sizes. Fault finding. Quoting. Customers. Apprentices. Suppliers. Bad installations. Good installations. Jobs that should have taken two hours and somehow became a three-day siege involving a floorboard, a dog, and a compression fitting last seen rolling towards the skirting board. All of that experience is real. None of it, by itself, tells him what digital product to make. Then somebody asks, “Why is one radiator cold when all the others are hot?” Suddenly the warehouse becomes useful. The problem has walked in carrying a shopping list.
