You might have a million problems, but not having problems to solve ain’t one of them.
On any given day, you have a plethora of options, in terms of what you choose to work on:
Question is though: What are the problems worth solving?
What, really, actually, is a problem deserving of your very limited resources?
You probably know people who are always running around, fighting fires, keeping plates spinning.
And very often, people like that get way less in terms of returns and success and revenue than they could. They might be getting results, but not quality results.
Why?
Because when you’re always flitting hither and thither, frantically solving problems, you’re very likely to lose focus on what really matters. When you’re not getting quality results, it’s very likely because you’re not focused on solving quality problems.
You end up spending all your time on low-quality problems, instead of the high-quality problems that can get you out-sized success.
For instance, it’s easy to try and work with your team, and try to improve morale and performance – but if there’s a lack of cohesion and communication at board level, that there is a high-quality problem to solve, and by comparison, the problem with the team is a much lower-quality problem.
And solving the team problem will be tough, if the board-problem exists and the board isn’t aligned. So by that logic, it makes much more sense to leave the team-problem as is for the moment, and work at solving the high-quality problem at the board level.
In a sense, this is similar to the urgent vs important distinction, but you might find it much more useful to ask yourself, when planning or at the start of the day:
"This problem I’m looking to solve… is that the highest-quality problem I have on my plate?"
If it isn’t, you’d do well to delegate or pause working on the problem, and pick a high-quality problem instead.
I think it was the psychologist Carl Jung who said that the quality of life is measured by the quality of the problems we encounter, and the same thing applies in business:
The more high-quality the problems you choose to engage with, the higher-quality your results will be.