The best person to explain a need is often the person living with it.

Deciding what someone needs from the outside feels efficient and is usually a little wrong in the ways that matter most. A person living with a condition, a schedule, or a constraint has run the experiment thousands of times and knows which sensible-looking solutions fail in practice. They are often not asked, partly because asking can feel like admitting you do not already know. Their answer would have saved everyone the detour.

When you arrange something on another person’s behalf, ask them what would actually help before you build it. Then take the answer seriously even when it is smaller or stranger than what you had planned.