An interesting story: a relative runs an old family shop that has built a solid reputation over decades. The older generation plans to retire and pass the shop to the next generation, but the younger generation is resistant. They think running such an old shop is too tiring, and they've heard that someone opened a breakfast stall selling pre-made dim sum, making easy money while finishing work by noon without needing to prepare ingredients. So they want to start a similar business from scratch.
It sounds quite absurd yet very real, and similar stories play out everywhere all the time.
Many so-called "opportunities" seem understandable to everyone, but very few people actually make money from them. Because what most people understand is not the opportunity itself, but the result packaged by a narrative. They see "someone made money doing this," without realizing that this statement itself is already a filtered outcome.
Moreover, when someone has already made a choice internally—for example, they simply don't want to take over the old shop—then all subsequent information gathering, analysis, and judgment will unconsciously serve this conclusion. They won't systematically study the real survival rate, profit structure, or site selection difficulty of a breakfast stall, nor will they break down the supply chain, channel costs, and operational details behind those "seemingly effortless" cases. They will only selectively see the fragments that "prove this is feasible."
The foundation of such judgments is not just "information asymmetry," but more importantly, "motivation contamination." Because they "don't want to take over the old shop," they construct a set of decision-making conditions for themselves, turning what should be a serious business decision into an emotional expression.
This reminds me of the concept of "activist blind spot" I learned earlier. It means that people assume they are right just because they start doing something. But "doing it first" is originally meant to get feedback faster, not to bypass thinking.
What some people call execution is simply magnifying an unclear judgment into real-world costs. Effective action requires knowing what you are verifying and, if wrong, what the cost will be. It's not about believing that doing it will guarantee success.
Decisions based on imagination sound rock 'n' roll. Many biographies of business tycoons describe how they climbed to the pinnacle of life through subtle observations and practice. But what those tycoons saw was demand; they charged forward to meet demand, not because they heard someone made a billion shoveling manure and then rushed to do the same.
Whether it's thinking "if others can make money, so can I" or "just do it and figure it out later," both are abandoning business logic and making excuses for "I need to do something." People who act on this logic don't care about failure because there is no narrative of failure in their minds. They all believe they are uniquely smart, able to spot opportunities others miss.
And once someone points out the problems in this, it shakes their "must do" values. So often, they are not making business decisions but defending their dignity.
Why can someone else make that money, but you can't?
Because most of the time, you only see the result after they've succeeded, not the demand, supply, costs, competitive environment behind it, and most importantly, how they made decisions and adapted when all conditions changed. That's why they could make money.
When you take others' results as your reason to act, and action as the result of thinking, you're essentially acting like a feudal-era farmer in the 21st century, mistaking luck for business rationality and using simplistic causal logic to understand a complex business system.
Once you get used to first deconstructing the structure before deciding whether to act, you'll find that many seemingly attractive opportunities have nothing to do with you. And some paths you originally overlooked may actually be closer to real feasibility.
This won't make decision-making easier; it will be slower, more restrained, and even more boring. But business is not a system that rewards emotions; it only rewards those who have a sufficient understanding of reality.
I think the problem has never been "whether there are opportunities" or "whether you dare to act." Before answering "whether it is," first figure out why the question "whether it is" exists. Only by understanding this can you know whether what you see is an opportunity or another sci-fi ghost story about making millions a day.