The flat he would want

Picture an agent showing a family round a flat in Kuwait City.

He talks about the view, because he loves the view. He points out the finish on the kitchen counters, which he chose for a different client once and was proud of. He mentions the pool on the roof twice.

The family has three children and a grandmother who will live with them. They want to know how far the school is, whether the lift is big enough for a wheelchair, and where the children will play. He has not asked, so he does not know.

It is natural. All of us spend most of our attention on our own taste, our own effort and our own needs. That is the default setting.

A fair market slowly corrects it. When the family can walk across the road to another agent, the one who talks about himself loses the sale. Not because he is a bad person, but because he built the conversation around the wrong person. The agent who gets the signature is the one who asked about the grandmother first.

The showing was never about him. It was about the family.

And the strange part is that this is the route to getting what you need as well. Pay real attention to what they are trying to solve, and the commission, the referral and the next family all follow.

The temptation, once someone has enough customers, is to stop. To make it hard to leave, to rely on the contract or the switching cost or the lack of alternatives, and go back to admiring the counters. Plenty of large businesses do exactly that.

They forget that what made them worth choosing in the first place was looking outward. Lock-in just lets them stop.