“The moment to solve a problem is when it is observed.”
It sounds stoic. Maybe that’s why I liked this quote and kept it on my wall for many years.
Only now I see the damage. As an entrepreneur, following this advice nearly derailed everything I was building. Let me explain.
The Fresh Eyes Fallacy
The first time you see a problem, you certainly have the advantage of fresh eyes on it.
If this problem is procedural, engineering, or mathematical, it might be a good idea to solve it immediately. Also, if you solve it while it’s occurring, you have the highest chance of understanding the context and causes of the problem in its immediate vicinity. For example, if a mouse has chewed the wire to your lamp, it’s wise to call the electrician and pest control immediately.
However, as an entrepreneur, I encounter a different breed of problems, and these problems have more than one solution. They have an infinite number of possible solutions.
The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma
When I rush to solve the problem with today’s knowledge, the problem is gone, but the solution I’ve implemented is only one in a million.
For instance, an entrepreneur might need more traffic to their website.
The simplest answer is to drive traffic through advertising.
But we’re missing all the nuance here: why does she want more traffic, to what end, and what needs to happen once the website has more traffic?
If we go and dig deep enough, the entrepreneur in question probably doesn’t need more traffic.
In this sense, the role of the entrepreneur is to decide which problems to solve and which problems they will allow to play out.
The Speed of Entrepreneurship
As an entrepreneur, you have a certain velocity. That’s a rhythm at which you can think, develop, invent, create, and to a certain degree, implement. And you have limited energy to do all of this. If you decide to invest this energy in solving problems, you’ll slow down. You have only a certain momentum; when you use it to solve a problem, you can’t use it to change the world.
You could have used that time to develop a vision, motivate more people around it, and do something groundbreaking. Instead you’re solving a problem.
Real-World Examples
I’ve recently made a significant change that created a ton of problems in my business. I went from a pure communication coach to a business coach.
The temptation would be to solve these problems one by one, but the reality is that it would be a mistake. For instance, in 2024, I refused much paid work, and my cash flow has been terrible.
I could have solved the cash flow problem by agreeing to conduct some workshops. However, workshops do not align with my long-term vision. If I had accepted those workshops, I would have slowed to a crawl. At that pace, I would have never achieved my goal of coaching executives and founders.
Instead, I spent time negotiating with my vendors and asked everyone for a payment plan rather than getting work that I didn’t want.
For instance, my website needs a ground-up redesign. I have been updating it in the past weeks to make it reflect what I’m doing right now, but the structure, the design, everything is coming from a website that I started in 2009 and grew organically over the years. The domain was registered in 1998.
Speak about legacy.
Currently, the site is a patchwork; it doesn’t represent my value. What I feel comfortable doing is: nothing.
If a client wants to know more about me, they will check my LinkedIn, check my website, check my YouTube, check my newsletters, check, check, check.
They won’t make a decision based on the design of my website. If they do, I don’t want them as a client. So you see, there’s another problem that I should wait to solve.
The Paradox of Problem-Solving
Here’s the kicker: often, even if we don’t solve the problem, it is on our minds, and even if we do nothing about it, it slows us down. “The moment to solve a problem is when it is observed” is incorrect for most entrepreneurial and growth issues. The question is posed under the wrong terms.
There’s one question to ask and one decision to make.
The question is: why is the problem there? What is it trying to teach me? What is it telling me that I don’t want to hear? Is it triggering me emotionally?
A problem is just an excuse to start a coaching journey.
Then once you’ve explored why the problem is there there is a decision to make. You can do one of three things:
- you’re going to accept the problem as a fact of life and keep going at full speed;
- or if you’re going to worry about the problem and let the problem slow down your thinking;
- or if you’re going to confront and solve the problem, which will slow you to a crawl.
The Katamari Principle
When I think about the role of an entrepreneur, I think about this old video game: Katamari Damacy. You are a prince and your job is to roll a ball with everything you can collect along the way.
The prince is the entrepeneur. The objects collected along the way are the problems. The more problems the bigger the ball, the higher the speed.
The prince doesn’t solve problems, he includes them into his ball. It gives her momentum.
So it’s not a matter of problems. It’s a matter of speed, just speed. If you want to go fast, you must accept issues. You must learn to live with the discomfort, and you have to let go of the anxiety. You have to smile at the anxiety. This is not an entrepreneurial problem. How you deal with a problem is purely a mindset problem.
The Opportunity Cost of Problem-Solving
If I were an economist, I would discuss the famous opportunity cost. If you’re unfamiliar with it, we can define it as what you give up by choosing one option over another. In other words, when I decide to solve the problem, what am I not doing?
I love an engineering mindset. I love opening WordPress and fixing pages. I love nothing else than creating content. I love operations, I love technology, I love learning a new tool, and there is a market full of tools that solve problems.
And that’s a problem.
Instead of solving problems, we should all learn how to let go of the worry and live with those problems long enough, just enough for them to play out and teach us what they needed to teach us.
Embracing the Long Game
So, for instance, I’m getting some excellent feedback on my website, about how its design does not reflect the content and what I do. I’m using this feedback in the back of my mind to start redesigning my personal brand.
This is not a simple thing I can fix with a couple of hours on WordPress. I will hire a personal branding coach, work with them, create a mood board, work on my positioning, develop the brand values, and then develop a design brief.
I will do this in 2025, or anyway, when it’s too late. I’ll do it when my growth is truly limited by how terrible my website is.
Right now, I’m going ahead full speed. I’m not letting anything slow me down, and when I feel some worry and discomfort, I ask myself: “What do I need to let go, and how can I continue going full speed without allowing this to slow me down?”
A New Perspective on Problems
Here’s a suggestion for a few quotes to put in your office instead of “The moment to solve a problem is when it is observed.”
“Do I want to slow down and solve the problem?”
“What is this problem trying to teach me?”
“What do I need to let go of to live with this problem?”
I hope this short text has changed how you think about solving problems.