Before I can talk about that, I need to tell you about the first time I bought something from an entrepreneur with my own money:

In elementary school, my friend made me an offer. He would make me a CD of the best songs of the month, for $2. At the time CDs sold for $15, so that sounded like a great deal. Oh, and I had to bring my own blank CD. I really enjoyed that CD. To give you a sense: Jin, Chingy, B2K, etc.

Later on, he told me that another one of our friends just wrote down a list of songs he liked, and that was the playlist. A true entrepreneurial move.

Over the years, his entrepreneurial streak continued. If you wanted a Clipse, “I Got It 4 Cheap” tee, he was your guy. He’d buy the coolest phones on eBay, fix them, and sell them to friends. When I figured out how to put an episode of The Simpsons on my Sony Ericsson w600i, he geeked out. He was the first person I saw with the Motorola Rokr, the phone with iTunes on it.

Several years later, while he was in university, he started a successful events promotion company. We’d been friends for years, and one night on the phone I finally asked him, “How do you think about entrepreneurship?” I’ll paraphrase his advice to me:

Look for problems and solve them. 

By extension, be curious, ask questions, and be observant. For example, his events promotion company was a remix of something that he saw one of our other friends’ dads do. I knew the friend, crossed paths with the dad, but I didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t know what he did, so I didn’t see the opportunity.

That night was the moment I really became an entrepreneur. Over the following months and years, I practiced what I learned, got employed, and eventually quit to start my own business.

In an age when it’s difficult to get hired as a person, but easier than ever to hire an AI, the skill of finding problems and solving them for people is what’s special and useful. Seth Godin writes, “If you can hire an AI to do tasks that solve problems for other people, you can do it again. If you do it well enough, you can do it for a living.”