Make Sure You're Solving the Right Problem

The Most Expensive Mistake I've Ever Made Wasn't a Bad Decision. It Was Solving the Right Problem in the Wrong Place.

I spent years fixing things that weren't broken.

I changed jobs. Ended relationships. Moved cities. Told myself I just needed a fresh start, different circumstances, better people around me.

The outcomes kept repeating.

It took a long time — and some honest time in therapy — to understand what was actually happening. I wasn't unlucky. I wasn't surrounded by the wrong people. I was carrying something I'd never put down, and it was quietly running every decision I made.

The real problem had been there the whole time. I just kept looking somewhere else.

You cannot solve a problem you haven't correctly identified.

Most of us are walking around managing symptoms. We restructure the team when the culture is the issue. We update the resume when the real question is why we keep ending up in the same kind of role. We optimize the strategy when the actual gap is in how we're showing up.

The source stays untouched. The symptoms keep returning.

Why We Avoid Looking Inward

The harder question — the one most people avoid — is this: Is the problem really out there, or is part of it living in me?

Most people never sit with that question long enough to get an honest answer. And it's worth understanding why, because avoidance isn't weakness. It's actually quite rational.

Looking outward is safer. If the problem is the company, the boss, the economy, or the relationship, then the solution lives outside of you. You retain your self-image. Your story stays intact. You don't have to confront the possibility that you've been contributing to the very outcomes you're frustrated by.

Looking inward is a different kind of risk. It requires you to consider that some of what you've been experiencing isn't happening to you — it's being shaped, at least in part, by you. That's a hard thing to sit with, especially when the external circumstances are genuinely difficult.

There's also the matter of identity. Many of us have built our sense of self around a particular narrative — the person who was let down, overlooked, dealt a bad hand. Questioning that narrative doesn't just threaten an explanation. It threatens who we think we are.

So we stay busy. We keep solving the visible problems. We call it productivity, and sometimes it even looks like progress.

Until the same problem shows up again, wearing a different face.

A Framework for Finding the Right Problem

Before you fix anything — the situation, the relationship, the team, the outcome — run it through these four questions. They won't give you comfortable answers, but they'll give you accurate ones.

1. How many times have I been here before?

If a version of this problem has appeared in multiple jobs, multiple relationships, or multiple phases of your life, the common denominator deserves your attention. Patterns aren't coincidences. They're data. The question isn't "why does this keep happening to me?" — it's "what am I bringing into every version of this situation?"

2. What story am I telling myself about who's responsible?

Write it down if you have to. Then ask: what would the other person's honest version of this story sound like? Not their excuse — their honest account. If you can't imagine it, or if imagining it makes you angry, that's information. The strongest sign that you're solving the wrong problem is an inability to see any version of reality where you're not entirely right.

3. What would I have to change about myself if the external fix didn't work?

This is the question most people skip entirely. If the new job doesn't solve it, if the new city doesn't solve it, if the conversation you're planning to have doesn't solve it — what then? Sitting with that question reveals whether you're genuinely solving or just relocating.

4. What am I afraid to find if I look closer?

This one requires honesty most people aren't used to extending to themselves. The answer is usually something simple: that I've wasted time, that I've hurt people, that I've been running from something I should have faced years ago. Those answers are painful. They're also the beginning of actual change.

The Only Door That Actually Opens

I spent a long time focused on what other people needed to fix. What they owed me. What they should have done differently. It felt like accountability. It was actually avoidance.

As long as I stayed locked on the external fix, I didn't have to look at the internal one.

“With broad mind, you're the solution, and with narrow mind, you're the problem.”― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

The moment I stopped asking "why won't that door open?" and started asking "what's behind the door I've never tried?" — everything shifted. Not overnight. Not without difficulty. But in a direction that actually moved.

I've watched it play out in the people I mentor too. The ones who get unstuck fastest aren't the ones with the fewest problems. They're the ones willing to ask harder questions about themselves before they go looking for answers everywhere else.

That willingness is the whole thing.

Before you fix the situation, the relationship, the team, or the outcome — make sure you're solving the right problem.

Ask what you might be carrying that you've never put down.

Ask what old blueprint might be quietly running underneath your newest frustration.

Start there. It's the only place the real work ever begins.