Solving problems can be a total waste of time.

“You need to list your problems and then start to solve them!” – Bad Guru

Most of the problems people spend time trying to solve are not their real problems. A guy wanting to sell beach balls that doesn’t sell many may think he needs to learn marketing better, or to develop a better beach ball. That doesn’t matter if he’s selling beach balls in Alaska. His problem is his environment, NOT all the other things. People do this with many parts of their life.

You can’t get the answer to a problem if you don’t know what the real problem is. – Truthcake

Finding the cause of the problem helps find the real problem. Because you can’t get a solution to that real problem until you know what the cause of that problem was.

Most of us that work hard are solving the wrong problem. – Truthcake

If the problem is, “My husband doesn’t buy all the groceries I tell him to buy,” A bad solution might be to create a checklist based on the idea that the problem was “forgetfulness.” But if you found out the cause of that problem was that he didn’t have enough time in the day, then you’d realize what the real problem was (eg being overwhelmed) and solve for that instead (eg helping free up his time).

When’s the last time you were solving a problem and then realized the solution didn’t help anything because it solved for the wrong problem.