In business, most people try to play their cards close to the vest: working hard to keep their secrets hidden; never sharing the valuable information that they’ve learned with a public that’s eager to know. Like a selfish magician, they show us the trick but refuse to let us in on the secret.
But great magicians are different. They’re not great because they know the secret; they’re great because they can perform the magic, teach others how they did the trick, and (most importantly) they know how to invent new tricks.
We don’t become truly great by being the only person in our market who knows how to do something. We become great by discovering what it is our clients need and figuring out how to give it to them.
We become great by solving interesting problems.
But, if we stop and think about it for a moment, the instant we’ve solved a problem, it’s really not that interesting anymore.
So, why not help everyone by showing other people how to solve it too?
The more we give away, the farther we go to help someone other than ourselves, to teach other people how we do what it is we’re doing, the more opportunities we’ll find opening up to us, offering us new and exciting problems to solve.
After all, if we become great by solving interesting problems, isn’t that what we should be doing?
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