One of the best ways to succeed in life is to find more problems. If you can find more things to solve, whether it’s with your business, your marriage, or your life, you have more ways to improve the situation. It’s interesting, because schools tend to train us completely the other way by handing us problems and just expecting us to provide the answer.
From his book “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman puts it this way:
“In the university, professors make up artificial problems. In the real world, the problems do not come in nice, neat packages. They have to be discovered.”
It would be fantastic if all of the little problems with our business were handed to us in a “nice, neat package”, but they don’t. A big part of fixing a problem is simply understanding what the problem really is.
- Why were sales down this month?
- Why did Steve quit last week?
- Why aren’t our social media posts getting more traction?
These sound like problems, but they’re just at the surface. Deep inside each of those are the real questions that need to be answered, and finding those questions is a powerful thing to do.
Discovering more questions is the only way to discover the answers, and that’s the key to continued growth.
