An evening rain forced four of us to stay back at the office a little longer. What began as random chatter eventually drifted into a question:

Every time someone asks me this, I get a little anxious. I’ve never had a convincing answer.

“It comes naturally with time” has always felt like a lazy explanation.

This time, instead of trying to answer, I narrated a story that had been stuck in my head.

A husband was complaining about his wife on a debate show. He said she was short-tempered and narrated an incident as proof.

They were riding somewhere on a bike when his wife told him she was hungry and asked him to stop somewhere. He kept riding, looking for a restaurant. After a while, she got angry, asked him to stop the bike and threatened to take an auto home.

The wife had a different version.

They had passed several tea shops along the way. She couldn’t understand why he kept driving when she had already told him she was hungry.

The husband defended himself. He wanted to take her somewhere better, about five kilometres away. And besides, he said, she had told him she was hungry only once.

It is an ordinary disagreement.

Most of us would probably interpret it in one of two ways: the husband was being insensitive, or the wife was overreacting.

But the host offered a third interpretation.

He said, women don’t always speak aloud about their hunger. It is your responsibility to interpret the situation.

That made me pause and lean in.

His argument was cultural. In many Indian households, women have historically been expected to suppress their hunger - cooking for everyone, serving everyone, and often eating last. Hunger, like many other needs, wasn’t always something women were encouraged to announce.

So his interpretation was simple: if she is telling you she is hungry, perhaps “once” is enough.

I kept thinking about what a beautiful interpretation that was.

I’m less interested in debating whether it is universally true, how many women it applies to, or what product or scalable solution someone can build from it. Those questions matter, but they come later.

Because before an insight becomes something you can quantify, segment, productise or scale, it does something much more basic.

Their feelings. Their behaviour. Their contradictions. The things they say, and sometimes the things they have learned not to say.

And perhaps that is why I struggle whenever someone asks me for a shortcut to finding insights.

The people who make it look effortless have usually spent decades being curious, hours arguing with themselves, and years developing the vulnerability to put an interpretation into the world knowing it could be wrong.

We live in a time when almost every narrative can be broken into sentences, fed into an LLM, and followed by the question: So, what’s the answer?

But sometimes there is no the answer. There are interpretations.

For most of our professional lives, we are rewarded for arriving at the right answer. Yet many of the hardest things we do have no single right answer.

Finding love. Finding a career. Finding product-market fit. Understanding another human being.

There are gurus with frameworks for all of them. There are playbooks promising to make the journey more efficient.

But eventually, you still have to make your own interpretation. You have to wander, notice, be wrong, change your mind, and notice again.

Perhaps that is also how you find an insight.