In July 1960, a twenty-six-year-old woman arrived at Gombe Stream in what is now Tanzania, having talked her way into a research opportunity that almost nobody in the scientific establishment thought was a good idea.
She had no formal scientific training. She had never conducted field research. Her qualifications amounted to a lifelong fascination with animals and a job as secretary to the palaeontologist Louis Leakey, who saw something in her that others didn’t. And she proposed studying wild chimpanzees not from a distance, through binoculars and clipboards, but up close. Sitting among them, watching them, learning their individual personalities and naming them rather than numbering them.
When her work later reached the academic world, the reaction was sceptical. Naming animals, she was told, was the kind of anthropomorphic sentimentality that had no place in rigorous research.
Jane Goodall ignored it all and kept watching.
The months when nothing happened
The chimpanzees fled whenever she came near. So she arrived at first light, sat quietly at a distance that didn’t alarm them, and watched. She kept notes on what she saw. Day after day.
Slowly, one older male began to tolerate her presence. She named him David Greybeard. He was the first to stop running, and through him, the others gradually came to accept her too.
Then, on 4 November 1960, she saw something that would overturn one of biology’s foundational assumptions. She watched David Greybeard pick a stem of grass, strip it of its leaves, push it into a termite mound and pull it out covered in termites to eat. He wasn’t just using a tool. He had made one.
At the time, toolmaking was considered the defining trait of our species. When Goodall reported what she had seen, Leakey replied: ‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’
From observation to pattern
The sighting made headlines. But on its own, it could have been dismissed as a curiosity. One clever chimpanzee doing one clever thing.
What turned it into science was what Goodall saw next, over the months and years that followed. Other chimpanzees doing the same thing. Juveniles watching adults closely, then trying it themselves, failing, and trying again. The behaviour being practised, refined and passed from one generation to the next.
What had looked like an isolated event revealed itself as something far bigger: evidence of social learning, of culture, in an animal other than us.
One observation made headlines. The pattern changed our understanding of what it means to be human.
Why this matters for entrepreneurs
The move from observation to pattern is where the most valuable entrepreneurial thinking happens.
Most people notice interesting things. A queue outside an unusual shop. A workaround a customer has invented. A habit that seems to be spreading among younger consumers. The difference is what happens next. Most people file it as a curiosity and move on.
Insightful entrepreneurs ask a different question: where else am I seeing this?
When the same underlying behaviour shows up in different places, in different industries or among different groups of people, that’s no longer an anecdote. It’s a signal. And signals are where opportunities live.
The entrepreneurs who seem to spot opportunities before anyone else are not operating purely on instinct. They draw on an internalised library they have built through sustained, curious attention to how the world works. Across industries, across cultures, across time. When something new appears, they recognise it, because they have seen its shape before somewhere else.
The library is what makes the pattern visible.
And the encouraging part is this: you don’t have to be born with it. Like Goodall at Gombe, you build it by showing up, paying attention and writing down what you see. Patiently, often for a long time before anything seems to happen.
Recognition is built one observation at a time.
This story appears in full in my book The Insightful Entrepreneur: Why Some People See What Others Miss, coming out in January 2027.
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