I Like My Problems, Please Stop Solving Them

There is a story about a remote African village that had one single water source.  To get fresh water, everyone in the village had to take a bucket or a bottle to this well in the center of the village, often several times a day. 

Seeing this problem, some Peace Corps engineers came in, and they installed a solar powered pump, and they ran PVC pipe to every single hut in the village.  Now, everyone had running water right in their hut.  Hooray.

A week later, the chief of the village came to the Peace Corps engineers and asked them to turn off the pump.  Why?  Because the well was the social center of the village.  "Going to get water" was an excuse to go see people, catch up on all the news and the gossip, and just generally hang out.  They didn't want their "problem" solved.

Another story: I have a friend who is very much of a mentor.  He is a management consultant, and whenever I have a unique challenge in my own business dealings, I always call him up to get his perspective.  Granted, his advice is excellent, but I also just love having an excuse to call him up and chat.  We occasionally "do lunch," but I don't think I would feel comfortable calling him up out of the blue if I didn't have a question to ask, i.e., a problem for him to solve for me. 

Third story: I am a bachelor, but I have had numerous girlfriends.  In these relationships, I often found myself in repeated conversations, in which these women would express a lengthy litany of troubles and problems they were having with their friends and/or their mothers.  Since I always considered myself to be a top-notch problem solver and solution provider, after listening to all these problems, I would always give them a laundry list of "actionable items" for them to follow in order to remove these problems.

You'll notice I'm still a bachelor. 

One of these ex-girlfriends finally laid it out for me: she said, "Justin, I don't want you to solve my problems.  I just want you to listen to them."

Duh.

I often see people saying that they "offer solutions" to their customers.  This makes me cringe every time I see it.  For one thing, it has become a meaningless cliché.  But more importantly, I like my problems.  My problems represent the biggest challenges that I can place on myself, both personally and professionally.  They are a great excuse to hang out and talk to people. 

If someone comes up to me and says, "Oh Justin, I can solve all your problems, and it won't take me very long, either," well, if they actually manage to take two minutes to solve the problems I've been working on for 20 years, do you really think this is going to thrill me?   If I walked into the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute tomorrow, and I blithely announced, "Hey everybody, I've got the cure for cancer!", do you really think this would endear me to people who have spent their entire lives working on this problem without solving it?  Right.

So the moral of the story is: for me at least, please stop offering solutions.  Solutions are great in school, but in real life, they often run the risk of being totally unappealing.  We're all eager to show how smart we are, but on a one-to-one personal basis, a solution is often a kind of dismissal.  A quick solution often fails to see what the problem really represents.  A quick solution can feel very much like a put down, and solutions often remove socially acceptable excuses for people to just get together. 

Listen to my ex.  Instead of offering a solution to my problems, offer me the willingness to listen to my problems, and offer to team up with me to work towards a solution.  Sometimes, simple sympathy IS the solution.  Also, the longer it takes to find a solution, the more fun you're going to have, and the more money you're going to make.


And by the way, if my ex's hadn't had all those problems, they would have been dating someone a whole lot better than me in the first place. 

(c) Justin Locke