How to find the ideas everyone else misses
A 5-minute daily habit for seeing breakthrough opportunities in plain sight.
This article is part of The Unseen, our work on decoding the systems and incentives that shape markets and opportunities.
You and I both know the feeling.
The world has never offered more ways to build something, and yet it has never felt harder to know what to do.
Substack gives everyone a megaphone. So does X, TikTok, and a dozen other platforms. You’re buried in an avalanche of "best practices," conflicting advice, and trend reports that are obsolete by the time you finish them.
This leads to a specific kind of paralysis. A smart person's paralysis. You spend weeks reading, learning, and planning. It feels productive. But you haven't actually made anything. You haven't taken a real risk.
The problem it’s a failure of attention.
We’re all looking for the next big thing in the same polished reports. But real opportunities don't live there. They are faint clues, hiding in the messy, predictable glitches of human nature and the weird anomalies in our own data.
If you want to build something that lasts, you have to stop looking where everyone else is. You have to train yourself to see what they miss.
And the clues are always hiding in one of three places.
The Tell: Predictable Human Glitches
Marketing platforms change. AI tools evolve. But the human brain's operating system? That’s remarkably stable. The most potent opportunities are always built on its predictable quirks: fear, vanity, curiosity, desire, and the irresistible pull of seeing what others are doing.
Your job is to look for the glitches in human nature.
Don't just consume content; deconstruct it. Take MrBeast's YouTube thumbnails. They're a masterclass in applied psychology. He doesn't show you a statement; he visualizes a question the human brain finds it painful not to answer ("I Survived 7 Days In An Abandoned City").
When you see a viral moment, don't just see the spectacle.
Interrogate it.
Ask:
"What specific emotion is that title really selling? Curiosity? Shock? Status?"
"What question did it plant in my mind so effectively?"
"What's the one lesson here I can use tomorrow for my own small project?" (Hint: It’s not "crush a Lamborghini with a tank." It's the part about creating a curiosity gap, which is surprisingly affordable.)
Think about the launch of Threads. Was it a revolutionary app? We both know it wasn't. It was a perfectly executed cocktail of psychology: FOMO ("Everyone's over there"), social proof ("Your whole network just joined"), and zero-friction onboarding.
Look for these glitches. That's your new research.
Spend 10 mins reading about trends and another 8 hours deconstructing the emotions that drive them.
The Clue: Anomalies in Your Own Backyard
The most valuable opportunities are often hiding in your own data, disguised as weird statistical smudges.
A few years ago, I had a small project and noticed a tiny trickle of traffic coming from a professional forum in a niche I'd completely ignored. It was a rounding error in my analytics. So easy to dismiss. Instead, I got curious. That one weird traffic source ended up revealing a profitable customer segment I never would have found otherwise.
An anomaly is a gift from the market. Go look for them in your own world.
It’s that old blog post that suddenly starts getting traffic. The one feature in your product you thought was minor that users keep mentioning in reviews. The sudden, unexplained spike in traffic from a country you don't target.
🔳 A weird data point is the market trying to tell you your assumptions are wrong. Listen.
Don't dismiss the irregularities.
The Truth: The Uncomfortable Friction of Action
This is the only source of truth you can generate yourself, and it's the most reliable one there is.
You can spend a hundred hours reading about how to launch a newsletter. But the real learning doesn't happen until you hit "publish" on your first awkward post and feel the gut-punch of either silence or a single, confusing comment.
That friction, the gap between your smooth theory and messy reality, is the ultimate teacher. This is why you must ruthlessly shift your focus from passive learning to active production.
🔳 Your daily scorecard shouldn't measure consumption ("I read three articles"). It should be a log of production, no matter how small.
Sent 5 DMs.
Posted one story testing a new description of my service.
Wrote one paragraph of my 'About Me' page (and realized it's shockingly hard).
Failure is the default setting here. Most of your DMs will be ignored. Most posts will land with a thud. That isn't the point.
The point is that you are in the arena. You are generating friction. You are generating your own, private, high-quality data.
The 5-Minute Daily Habit
So, how do you start building this muscle of "seeing" today?
At the end of each day, run this simple, 5-minute exercise. It's a habit that forces you to go from being a consumer to a deconstructor.
Grab a notebook.
🔳 The 3 Questions:
Pick one thing you saw today that genuinely caught your attention. An ad, a title, an email. Then ask:
What specific emotion did it trigger in me?
What was the one detail (a word, an image, a question) that made it work?
How could I use a tiny piece of that same principle tomorrow?
That’s it. Five minutes.
This is how you stop being overwhelmed by the options and start seeing the opportunities. This is how you begin.
Your brain might feel sore after the first few days.
Good. That means it’s working.
Hi!
I'm Yuehan. After a decade spent building businesses in both the West and China, I'm sharing my most valuable, road-tested lessons right here on Substack.
Since I'm starting from scratch on this side of the world, your support means a great deal. If this piece resonated, a restack or a simple ❤️ is massively appreciated
.