Noticing an underserved pain in an overlooked market

What’s your position on rewatching and rereading?

Are you someone who enjoys consuming the same content over and over?

Or are you more of a one and done kind of person?

This preference is quite polarizing. It’s kind of like the small percent of the world who believes cilantro tastes like soap. Those savages.

Personally, one of the great joys of my life is repeat consumption. Revisiting quality movies, books, albums and podcasts is a source of deep inspiration for me. Doing so allows for the recognition of details, nuances and interrelations that initially were overlooked in the first or second exposure.

After all, the content doesn’t change, we do. Consuming something again six months or six years from now will add new value to our lives, not because the thing is different, but because we are.

We can’t step in the same river twice.

There’s a fascinating study from a psychology journal which proved that repeat experiences are actually less repetitive than people might think. Participants went to museum exhibits and watched movies and played video games multiple times. Their survey responses showed that continued exposure to the same content made them less naïve to the missed nuances remaining to enjoy.

Despite the traditional assumptions about hedonic adaptation and novelty preferences, repetition added an unforeseen spice to life.

Also in my experience, repeating is also a useful training ground in the art of noticing, which is perhaps the most underrated business skill in the modern workforce.

Those who can discern patterns where others see random pictures are most likely to innovate. The people who know how to introduce more awareness into their daily lives are more likely to notice things, see patterns, make assertions, uncover distinctions, identify leverage and build things that create economic value.

My attorney friend spent years working at law offices and loathed every minute of it. When he ultimately decided to strike out on his own and put his entrepreneurial gifts to work, he noticed an underserved pain in an overlooked market.

Dan realized that there were no apartment search firms exclusively focused on new graduates and first time renters. That population, which renewed itself twice a year, required a completely different service than anyone else.

And so, he built a process that ensured those people could make a fully informed decision on their perfect apartment. One where they didn’t have to deal with the aggravations of scouring the internet and having multiple agents showing them different apartments, none of which actually fit their needs.

Dan’s company was profitable within two months. Because he was good at noticing. He acknowledged what had been tragically neglected, and focused his entire business around addressing that underserved pain.

What are you overlooking simply because it’s outside your field of vision? What gifts are inside of you and around you, just waiting to deployed?

If you want to expose yourself to new possibilities that you would have previously discounted, it’s time to introduce greater attention.

You don’t necessarily have to watch the same movie over and over again, but it wouldn’t hurt.

How might you solve a real problem with an elegant solution and in a market that’s underserved?