I'm great at solving problems.
It's just that they're not always the right ones.
I was having one of those existential crises you hear about on Oprah.
What am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I spending hours on newsletter articles during peak golf season?
Each article is a story of me trying to fix something - sometimes with unfortunate consequences.
Every week, a new embarrassment. But each one had a point: something I had learned the hard way:
Speak up sooner.
Ask better questions - early on.
Don’t think you’re the only one who doesn’t understand something.
After writing 70+ of these tales, I was at a loss. What is the point of all these points?
There had to be one. There was something driving me to write, week after week.
So I did what I love to do: dove into the data.
In this case, the data was my article archives. And it wasn’t really me doing the diving - I needed an impartial third party.
Enter my trusty Notion AI. I call him Hector.
I asked Hector to read each article and find what, if any, connected them.
After spending a thoughtful 2 minutes on this project, Hector reported back.
They are, essentially, all the same story.
It seems every article followed the same basic pattern: I saw a problem and aimed to remedy it.
And missed.
It wasn’t my actions that were wrong. I had usually done exactly the right thing for the problem I’d identified.
And there it was. I’m a pro at problem solving. Where I fumbled was the problem seeing.
I worked hard to solve problems that weren’t THE problem.
What’s funny is that, before initiating this whole deep dive into my work, I had done it again.
I thought the problem was that I was losing steam, not sure where I was headed with all these confessions and lessons learned.
What I missed was the much larger story to tell, hiding in my Notion database.
I’m not the only one who has aimed at the wrong target (although I may be the only one who nearly glued her mouth shut or accidentally gave up $700,000 while doing so).
We all solve the wrong problem sometimes.
I want to understand why - and how to catch it sooner.
More on Problem Seeing
Apparently I’m not done with this.
The more I dig into Problem Seeing, the more I find the same pattern: we see something wrong, come up with a plausible explanation and commence to fixing it before we’ve established what’s actually going on.
More here:
Thanks Hector for helping my fried "see" the problem. She'll take it from there (solve).