The problem eating all your energy might be the most useful thing you own. As long as it stays this loud, you never have to ask a much bigger question.
You know the one…we’ll come back to that one.
But first – this one, always at hand, always present, the problem that’s consumed every late night and half your conversations for months. The cash flow that won’t behave. The hire that isn’t working. The launch that keeps slipping. You could describe it in full detail, in your sleep.
You’ve thrown real intelligence at it. Made progress, lost it, made it again. And it’s still here — still loud, still the first thing your mind grabs in the silence between your thoughts.
Here’s a strange question: what if part of you doesn’t actually want it gone?
I don’t mean that as an accusation, by any stretch. I mean it the way I learned it, too – the hard way, in my own businesses. A problem that consumes you is doing a quiet job for you. It gives you somewhere precise to put yourself. As long as it’s this urgent, this demanding, this obviously important, you always know what to work on. You’re never idle, never adrift, never staring at that open question of ‘what now’.
Think of it like a hamster wheel. You’re pedalling hard, you’re sweating, you’re definitely busy — and the wheel never once asks you where you’d go if you stepped off. That’s the gift of it. The motion feels like progress and saves you from the harder question at the same time.
But Gabe, the problem is real — I’m not making it up. Yes, of course it is. And that’s exactly what makes it such a good cover. Nobody can accuse you of hiding when you’re working harder than anyone in the building. The urgency is real. The problem is real. That’s the disguise.
So let me ask it a different way.
Close your eyes for a few seconds. Picture the problem simply gone. Not solved through heroics and hard work….just gone. Evaporated overnight. You wake up tomorrow and it’s not there anymore. The hours are back. The attention is free. You’re full of energy, at last.
Most founders, when they sit with that for the first time, don’t feel relief, believe it or not. They feel something closer to vertigo.
Because the problem was an excellent decoy, fake-answering a question they’d quietly stopped asking: What all of this is for, and where they’re actually trying to take it.
A loud problem is so much easier to face than a silent, open one about where your one finite company, and your one finite life, are really going. Focused attention is the most valuable resource in the Universe, and this problem has been quietly spending all of yours.
So here’s the question worth more than the solution:
If this problem stopped taking all your time and energy right now, what do you give that time and energy to instead?
Don’t answer fast. The quick answer — “obviously, grow the business” — is the same problem wearing a new coat. The real answer comes slower, and usually with a little resistance, because it’s the thing all that urgency has been protecting you from naming.
You’ll know you’ve reached it when you go quiet for a while, and then watch new insights emerging from that space you’ve created. Sometimes, it feels like magic. It isn’t.
I’d love to hear what surfaces when you actually sit with that.