3 Steps To Becoming A Better Problem Solver | Ep 236
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- I used to drown in problems because I was trying to solve everything at once. Then I changed how I work and it completely transformed my life. Here are three steps that if you follow, can do the same for you. The first step is that you have to stop

Stop solving other people's problems. Okay, one of the most common traps is trying to solve everything for everyone. And I get it because it feels like helping. But in reality, what it does is it creates dependency because then that person is dependent on you rather than themselves to solve their problems in the future.

And so if you're always jumping in to fix things for all the people around you, whether it's your family, whether it's your team, they will never develop problem-solving skills and you become the bottleneck. I see this all the time with people surrounding me and within myself. Back when I was younger and I lived in a household and my mother was an alcoholic,

and I was constantly trying to solve her alcohol problem for her. I was taking away the bottles. I was hiding stuff from her. I was driving her to work. I was trying to solve the problem and not allowing her to solve it. And part of that is because if you try to solve the problem from somebody, you take away some of the pain that they feel by having the problem.

And so because of that, they're less likely to want to change. The mindset shift to make here is to understand that when you solve problems for somebody, you take away opportunity for them to learn. And the thing that I tell people when they bring problems to me is I say, "Oh, no, no, no, no.

I don't need to learn anything. I already know how to solve this problem, but you haven't solved the problem before. So you should learn. Here is what I would do if I were you. Put it back on that person. Oftentimes when somebody comes to you and they want to bring their problems to you, it's like they don't even trust themselves to solve the problem. But if you ask that person, what do you think you should do? What you might find is that how they think they should solve the problem is actually a fantastic way to solve the problem. And they just haven't voiced it because they're insecure. They're doubtful. They're uncertain of themselves.

But you're never going to give them the chance to instill that sense of confidence in themselves if you just immediately assume they don't know what to do. And so the first thing you want to do is say, what do you think you should do? Now, if they're like, I asked you because I truly have no idea. I've never done this before. Okay, if you really have no idea of what to do, what I can do is I can share with you the frameworks and the strategies that I use to troubleshoot my problem, or at least how I

I would think through a problem if I were that person. What's more valuable than solving someone's problems is giving them the frameworks to solve them on their own. And so what you're essentially doing is you're teaching somebody to fish rather than fishing for them. And so this means that they walk away, they actually have a skill that they can continue to repeat and use for the rest of their lives. And you get your time back and your sanity because you're not solving everybody's problems all the time. Teaching others to solve problems is the fastest way that you can multiply your impact.

Teaching people to do anything that you yourself are used to doing is the fastest way to get leverage. It's the fastest way to multiply your impact. It's the fastest way to relieve some of your time. And I get it because listen, I used to be the type of person that wanted to solve everyone's problems. But what I realized is that was actually very selfish of me.

Because when I solve problems all on my own, I steal the learning and the opportunity from other people to acquire those skills. So if you really care about people, you will let them solve their own problems. Here's a question that I would ask myself if I were trying to figure out if I was constantly solving other people's problems.

How might my involvement in solving this problem create dependency and what impact would that have on that person's growth or mine? The second question you can ask yourself is, have I given this person the tools or guidance to solve similar problems to this in the future on their own? Something that I catch myself doing all the time is that people will come to me and ask me questions.

and they'll say, "What do you think about this?" And when I'm not being mindful, I'll just give them an answer. When I am being mindful and I'm in the moment and I'm present, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, this is a great opportunity to solve the problem." So much so that the other day when a teammate was incessantly asking for the answer to a problem, I said, "Listen, I don't need to learn this, but you do."

If I solve this problem for you, then really nothing changes in my life. But if you know how to solve this problem, then you gain more skills and you get to tackle this with confidence in the future. And you probably gain significantly more confidence than if I were to just do this for the hundredth time. Throughout life, you are going to be confronted with endless problems. Taking on other people's problems doesn't help you and it doesn't help them.

It steals your time and it steals your attention. And it steals from them the skills and the confidence that they would get if you pushed it back on them to solve their own problems. So once you've bought yourself enough time back by not solving everybody's problems, then you want to get better at building your problem-solving skill set.

Skills take reps, not time to accumulate. So people often think that they're bad at solving problems because they lack talent, they're dumb, or they don't have time. And here's the truth. Most people actually just lack reps. Skills like critical thinking, problem solving, troubleshooting, they're not innate. You're not born with them. They're simply developed through repetition. Every problem you solve is a rep. The more problems you tackle, the sharper your skills become. What you want to do is reframe challenges as

opportunities to put in the reps. So for example, growing businesses. When I first started in business and there would be a problem in the business, it was like, how do I overcome this? I need to talk to people, I need to ask for help, I need to do all this stuff. Now, when a problem arises in business, I have a framework for how I think through that problem, I can solve that problem very quickly. How did I get good at that? At this point in my career, I've advised thousands of businesses on how to solve their problems. I've solved different problems in four of my different businesses thousands of times.

I have helped solve tens of thousands of problems over the last decade in business. And so it's literally just the reps. It's the reps of looking at a business, looking at all the metrics, looking at all the people, and then saying, where do I think the constraint is? And I've just done that time and time and time again. Even when we first started acquisition.com and I would be

looking and analyzing a company. It would take me, I remember, about two days of going through everything to really figure out what I think the biggest opportunity is to grow the business and how to deconstrain it. Now I can look at a business and within 10 minutes I can tell you what I think the number one thing they need to do to grow their businesses. It's because I got in the dirt and I just did the shit for the last three years. It's just reps. Skills aren't built by the clock. They are

They are built by the reps. So if you're facing problems right now that feel hard to solve, I want you to ask yourself this question. Am I viewing these problems as obstacles and problems that I need to avoid or as opportunities to build my skills through repetition?

The reason why a lot of people never get really good at solving certain problems is because they're too afraid to suck. When I first lost 100 pounds, when I first started my business, it's not like I seemed like I do now in the beginning. Like I fucking sucked. The reason why I've been able to do this in different areas of my life is not because I'm different than the person watching this video. The reason is because I'm okay sucking. I don't think it's a problem.

I think that that's where greatness is born. And so you have to embrace this mindset that skills are built in the suck. They're not built when you feel great. So now that you understand it is about the reps that you put in, not the time you put in to actually solving problems, let's reframe how to approach solving your problems in general. One of the most important epiphanies that I have ever had, which is that you solve problems in sprints, not marathons.

Okay, the biggest mistake that we make is treating every problem that comes on our plate as if it is equally urgent and important. When you are constantly available to fix things and solve problems, you become reactive, not proactive. And what this does is it creates an illusion of progress, but it leaves most of your problems half solved. So you don't get that feeling of confidence from actually solving a problem because of a bunch of half-baked solutions. So instead, we've

we want to treat problem solving like a sprint. We want to focus on one problem at a time, give it our full attention, and push all the way through until it is fully resolved. Then and only then do we move on to the next problem. Solving problems takes your attention. And so the more of your attention that you have to put on one problem, the faster you solve it. Imagine it like this. You have all of this energy,

your attention and you have six problems that have been presented to you. If you try to tackle those six problems all at the same time, each problem only gets 15% of your attention. But if you say, you know what, I'm gonna first tackle this problem, then that one problem gets 100% of your attention. And so this is why I'm such a fan of sprints because sprints create urgency and focus. Urgency because you're like, oh my gosh, I really wanna solve these other problems. I just wanna get this done.

But focus because you're telling your brain, I don't need to solve these other problems right now. I can put them on a spreadsheet, put them on a document, put them in a bucket, and I will come to those problems next after I've solved this one. This was one of the biggest unlocks that I had ever had because every three to four months, I decide what are the top four to five problems I need to focus on. And I look at my personal life the same way. Then typically what I do is I set out to solve those problems. And it wasn't until I sat down with one of my friends, his name was Sharon, and he told me how he solves problems.

I thought though he might be presented with these are the four to five problems I need to solve, and I might be presented with these are the four to five problems I need to solve, he will not try and tackle them all at once. So what I was doing is in all my free time, I was rotating between these four to five problems. For him, he said, I do focus sprints where I solve one problem and I do not move on to the next until that problem is solved.

And it was in that moment that I had this light bulb go off where I was like, wow, I can't believe I've been doing this all these years. I changed making myself available to help solve all problems that exist in my company to focusing on one at a time. And then I thought to myself, wow, this same principle could apply to any area of life. And so my tip for you is this.

prioritize problems based on three things, urgency, impact, ability to reverse. Okay, so urgency is, does this problem get better or worse if I wait? If the problem gets worse if you wait, it's more urgent. How big of an impact would it have? 10%, 20%, 30%? And then lastly, how hard is it to reverse? Meaning, depending how you solve this problem, does

Does it have irreversible damage or solutions to your life? And so the best thing you can do once you identify what those problems are is then you create dedicated blocks of time to work on that problem. You want to make sure that you constrain your problem and you do not give yourself too much time to solve it. If you move towards problem solving sprints, which I am a huge advocate of, ask yourself this question. How can you reward yourself for solving a problem?

What is a reward for you? Is it spending time with somebody you love?

Is it buying something for yourself? Oftentimes we wait for other people to reward us for our efforts. But why do that when you can reward yourself? And this is something I am such an advocate of because I have such a better relationship with solving problems and with myself since I started rewarding myself for solving problems. Essentially what I'm doing is I'm rewarding and reinforcing myself for working hard on something in a way that makes my life better. Big progress happens in small focused sprints, not endless marathons.

Switching from a marathon mentality to focusing on short, intense sprints will help you prioritize what actually matters. And it will help you push through because you know what's on the other side, which is either getting ahead and solving the next problem or rewarding yourself by

by giving full attention to one problem at a time, you are going to make faster progress, you're going to reduce the sense of overwhelm, and you're not going to feel so busy. So here's a question to ask yourself. Which problem of all the problems on my plate, if solved first, will give me the most attention back? And that's the one you want to start with. So to sum it all up, we want to stop solving problems for other people.

We want to start building our problem-solving skills with reps. We want to tackle issues with focused sprints. Problem-solving is not about being busy. It's about transforming how you work. It doesn't mean that you need to work harder. It means that you need to put more time into thinking about what you work on at what point in time.