They watched to see what they did that we don't. There must be something that these people do, perhaps intuitively that we don't and finding many such successful interventions, they systematised this into a theory and tested if others could approximate, if not match their success in moving beyond their own problems or helping others with theirs. NLP simply means Neuro for brain and central nervous system, linguistic for language both verbal and non-verbal and programming meaning that these are a set of software packages for the hardware of the human brain. They are observations and suggestions, ways to convert theory into action. If we try hard enough, even though we might never match his genius, we might far surpass our own expectations.
Success leaves clues, like failure leaves footprints in the sand.
Understanding NLP conceptually was fairly easy because of the background he had, says Khan. But he had reservations about the way it was being presented at the time, seeing it as too slick or too clinical and boring. The next five years were spent in the US, shuttling from California to Texas, New York to Seattle, Florida etc. after the new course became immensely popular. But it became clear to me that the US was not short of NLP trainers or training resources, and there was precious little point given that I was initially drawn into this by the challenge of conveying this to different sets of people. To their astonishment, the response from Karachi folk was overwhelming.