Solve problems before chasing money
When someone starts thinking about building a business or offering a service, the first instinct is usually to figure out how to make money, and that instinct, while understandable, tends to get things backwards.
The more useful starting point is to identify a very specific problem that a real person is experiencing, and then ask what the fastest possible way is to reduce the pain that problem is causing them. Not a vague category of problems, but one clear and concrete issue that someone is dealing with right now.
There is something worth understanding here about what makes a problem worth solving, which is that the solver should have some real qualification to address it. That qualification might come from professional training, from personal experience, from study, or from having worked through the same problem before, but it needs to be grounded in something real rather than just enthusiasm.
The word qualification matters because solving a problem poorly, or offering help that creates new confusion, does not actually reduce pain, and so the focus has to be on genuine relief rather than the appearance of being helpful. A doctor who has studied a condition, a mechanic who has rebuilt the same engine a hundred times, a person who has navigated a difficult legal process and come out the other side, all of these people carry something transferable.
The second piece of the idea is something called reverence, which is the practice of offering help without any expectation of receiving something back in return. This is not just a philosophical nicety but a practical observation about how human relationships and transactions actually work.
When someone does something kind or helpful while quietly expecting a reward, that expectation is often felt by the other person even when it is never spoken aloud, and it changes the texture of the interaction. The gesture stops feeling like a gift and starts feeling like a trade, and trades are evaluated differently than gifts.
Josh uses the example of buying flowers for a partner, and the distinction he draws is between buying flowers because you want something in return versus buying flowers because you genuinely want the person to feel seen and loved. The outcome might look the same on the surface because flowers were bought either way, but the meaning attached to the act is completely different depending on the internal motivation.
When the motivation is purely transactional, the gesture loses something real. The other person may still receive the flowers but they may also sense the calculation behind them, and that sensing reduces the emotional weight of the act. When the motivation is genuine care, the gesture carries its full value.
This same principle scales directly into business. A service provider who is constantly calculating what they will get out of each interaction tends to offer something that feels hollow, and clients and customers are generally better at detecting that hollowness than the provider realizes. Conversely, a provider who is genuinely focused on reducing someone's pain tends to build something that feels trustworthy, and trust compounds over time.
There is a concept in economics sometimes called something like intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, which is the difference between doing something because you find it meaningful in itself versus doing it to get an external reward. Research across many fields has found that intrinsic motivation tends to produce higher quality output, more persistence through difficulty, and better long-term outcomes for both the person doing the work and the people they are serving.
The mechanism behind this is fairly simple. When you are genuinely trying to solve someone's problem, you notice things you would not notice if you were primarily focused on your own outcome, and those noticed things are often exactly what makes the difference between a solution that works and one that falls short.
Building a business on the foundation of actually solving problems also creates something called word of mouth, which is when satisfied people tell other people about an experience without being asked or paid to do so. Word of mouth is different from advertising because it carries the credibility of a real person speaking from personal experience, and that credibility is very difficult to manufacture or buy.
When someone's problem is genuinely solved, and when they felt that the person helping them actually cared about the outcome, they tend to tell other people about it because human beings are wired to share experiences that exceeded what they expected. That sharing is what causes a business to grow without requiring the owner to constantly chase new customers through paid channels.
The math of this compounds quickly. One person whose pain is genuinely relieved tells two or three others, and some of those people come with their own problems and have their own experiences, and if those experiences are also genuine and effective, the network grows on its own. This is sometimes described as something called organic growth, which means growth that comes from the natural spread of reputation rather than from deliberate promotional spending.
None of this means that making money is wrong or that thinking about revenue is somehow corrupt. It means that revenue tends to follow genuine problem-solving the way a shadow follows movement, and that chasing the revenue directly, especially early on, often produces a kind of frantic energy that actually repels the people you are trying to serve.
The sequence matters. Problem first, then the person experiencing the problem, then the specific pain that problem is causing, then the fastest honest way to reduce that pain, and then the offering of that help without attaching a quiet invoice of expected returns to it. When those steps are in the right order, the business question tends to answer itself over time.
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