Someone must have already done that.

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1059 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. And this message is dedicated to Bern and Jeanne Bertsche.

Here’s the upgrade: You may think the obvious problems are already solved, but upgraded thinking knows the obvious problem is the one nobody bothered to fix.

Here’s the story.

In 2013, Jamie Siminoff walked onto Shark Tank with a doorbell you could answer from your phone. He asked for $700,000 for ten percent of his company. Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec — they all passed. They saw a doorbell. A small market. A gimmick.

A few years later, Amazon bought that company for a billion dollars. I heard Jamie’s story on a podcast, but he has a book coming out titled Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door.

The Sharks weren’t ding dongs. They were looking at the wrong thing. They saw a doorbell business. Jamie was building a home security company. Same product, completely different story.

But here’s the part that stuck with me. Jamie’s whole career has been built on simple ideas. He’s proof you can be a ding dong and make it. A doorbell you answer from your phone. A way to turn voicemail into text. A button to unsubscribe from junk email. These are Jamie’s simple ideas that he’s turned into businesses. The kind of ideas that make you say, “Someone must have already done that.”

That’s the trap. That sentence kills more businesses, more inventions, more art, more ministries, more moves of courage than any competitor ever will. It’s the voice that tells you the problem in front of you is too obvious to be yours to solve or that it’s worth solving.

Jamie says he just looks for problems to solve, not businesses to build. That’s it. He’s not chasing technology. He’s not chasing trends. He walks through his own life, finds something broken, and fixes it.

Most people walk past the same broken thing every day and assume the world has already handled it. It hasn’t.

One of my daughters had a class project recently where a mock Shark Tank was created. She pitched the idea for an app that connects students in study groups who need help in different classes. She mentioned another idea that someone else pitched of a school-specific Uber app, ride sharing based upon your local school. You think someone must have already done that. No. They haven’t. They walked past it just like you.

The person who wins is not the one with the most original idea. It’s the one naive enough — or stubborn enough — to fix the obvious thing while everyone else assumes it’s already fixed.

The better story to tell yourself is, “If I see it, it’s mine to fix.” The Sharks said no. Jamie kept building. The problem was real. The solution was simple. That was enough. That thing you keep noticing — go fix it. Nobody else is going to.

Tell me a story of an obvious problem you finally stopped walking past to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and as, “What is a problem you’ve noticed that needs fixing?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.