Stop Trusting the Map: Why What People Say is a Terrible Guide to What They Want

There is a comforting ritual in the world of 'spreadsheet' business. When faced with uncertainty, the entrepreneur is told to "do the research."

What does this mean? It means they run a focus group. They send out a survey. They earnestly ask their customers, "What do you want?"

This is a catastrophic, if well-intentioned, mistake.

It is an exercise in asking the map to describe the territory. The problem is, humans are dreadful witnesses to their own motivations. We are brilliantly designed to invent a logical-sounding reason for our feelings after we have already acted on them.

What people say is a story. It's the story they tell themselves, and you, to make their behaviour seem rational. "What people say, what people do, and what they say they do," as the great David Ogilvy noted, "are entirely different things."

The Parable of the Empty Cake Mix

Consider the cautionary tale of the first instant cake mixes in the 1950s.

From a 'spreadsheet' standpoint, they were a miracle of modern efficiency. Just add water, stir, and bake. A perfect "solution." The numbers must have looked beautiful.

There was only one problem: they didn't sell.

Why? If you had run a focus group, what would people have said? They would have invented reasons. "Oh, the texture is a bit off," or "I prefer the taste of my own, from scratch."

How profoundly unimaginative.

They would not have said the real, human truth: "This mix makes me feel like a fraud. It's too easy. If I use this, I am not 'baking' for my family; I am a lazy liar."

The truly creative minds at the food company found the counter-intuitive solution. They didn't make the product "better" in a conventional sense. They didn't improve the taste or lower the price.

They made it harder.

They took the powdered egg out of the mix and changed the instructions. The new recipe required the baker to perform the sacred, creative act of... adding a fresh egg.

This tiny bit of human friction was the key. It solved the emotional barrier, not the functional one. By adding an egg, the baker was now baking. They were a participant. The guilt evaporated, and sales rocketed.

You Are a Master Observer

The 'spreadsheet' entrepreneur trusts the map, the survey, the data. They listen to what people say.

The entrepreneurs at Rise Beyond Barriers are, by necessity, different.

When you spend your life navigating a world that wasn't designed for you, you learn a vital skill. You learn to ignore the "map": the official instructions, the "standard" way of doing things: because the map is frequently wrong or useless for your context.

Instead, you learn to watch. You become a master observer of actual, human behaviour. You see the real points of friction, the real workarounds, and the real desires that people cannot, or will not, articulate.

This is your profound advantage. You don't need to send out a survey. You are a living "desire line" detector.

So, stop asking questions. Stop trusting the data. The real opportunity is never in the spreadsheet. It's in the messy, irrational, wonderful truth of what people do. Start observing, and trust what you see.