#275: How to Solve Your Most Stubborn Business Problems

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for a better client. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries today, you're going to get a lot of me, myself and I. It's just me today sharing some ideas with you and you know the general theme. Today's conversation is how to solve your most stubborn business problems. I do a lot of thinking in this area. I mean, we were all problem solvers. We're all getting paid to solve problems. As a business coach, this is a huge part of what I help my clients do. And of course, I got challenges of my own in my own business that I'm constantly trying to get through. So how to solve stubborn, complex problems is something that's near and dear to my heart, something I spent a lot of time thinking about. And today I want to share some thoughts and ideas on how you can become a better problem solver. Specifically, not just everyday problems, but really problems that involve major obstacles, where there are a lot of different possible outcomes, a lot of possible approaches, where there's a lot at stake, where you're gunning after a pretty significant goal that's going to require the very best of you. If you're trying to make small, incremental improvements in your business, I'll say that most of what I'll share with you won't apply. I still urge you to give this episode a full listen, but I'm going to be really. The whole assumption is that we're talking about big goals, big challenges in front of you, the stuff that's really going to test you. So if you're looking for real breakthroughs, if you want massive improvements in your income, work, life balance, client quality, and just overall joy in what you do, then I have some ideas today that will hopefully get you thinking and moving in the right direction. The big problems we face today in our business are just not easy problems to solve. That might seem like an obvious thing, but let me make this a little bit more concrete. Say you've been earning 60,000 to $70,000 per year for the past five or six years. Not a bad thing. That's. That's great. But you want to earn more and you feel like you've been stuck there. You can't seem to break through that ceiling and make some serious headway. Let's say you want to double that, and not in 10 years. You want to double that in a year or two. But nothing you try seems to work long term. Nothing seems to be sustainable. It might generate a new client, but then you lose a couple of existing clients. So you're, you know, one step forward, two step backward. Or what you did to generate more income was, let's say, very time consuming and left you exhausted. So you don't feel like you really had a net gain. Or maybe you do have a breakthrough and get to, say, $100,000 the following year, but you're now beyond book solid and you're miserable and you feel like you have no real work life balance most weeks. So just don't feel again that you really got ahead. And the reason this happens so often is that these are what are called complex problems. And complex problems, I mean, it might sound obvious what it is on the surface, but really complex problems require a different level of thinking and different behavior patterns to solve effectively. When I say complex, I mean they could be overwhelming when you break them down, when you pull them apart. And let me give you a quick example. Let's say you live in Atlanta and you're trying to get to Dallas, Texas by car. Let's call that an objective, right? Getting from Dallas, I mean, from Atlanta to Dallas, it's also a problem. It's an objective, but it's also a problem you have to solve, a challenge you have to tackle. And the question is, how do you do it? What are your options? Which routes do you take? Again, you're going to go by car, not by plane. Where do you stop for gas? And you know, let's just say that, well, maybe I'm not going to drive. Maybe I should fly. Okay, great. So what airline should you pick? What schedule? Who will drive you to the airport? What will you pack? Where will you stay when you're there? There's just all kinds of things you have to think through, a lot of variables to consider, lots of questions to answer, many decisions you have to make. But there are still, when you think about it, a number of limited number of variables and options and combinations to consider, right? We're not talking about an endless set of possibilities. Within reason, there. There are still a limited number of possibilities and possible solutions. Complex problems are different. They have way more moving parts. And because of that, the options and permutations are overwhelming. There are too many of them to consider. And in fact, as you start Taking action, the landscape could be changing around you, so you often have to pivot along the way. And I've also found that with complex problems, one of the things that makes them so complex is we're dealing with people. So it's you dealing with other humans who, let's face it, are unpredictable. They have their own agendas, assumptions, beliefs, goals. And you're dealing with you as a human in your emotions, an evolving set of emotions that shift from minute to minute, hour to hour, based on the different stimulus you might be encountering. And really, that just makes things so unpredictable. And when you think about the big goals you've tried to go after, big problems you've tried to solve in your business, I bet that in most of these situations, you see exactly what I'm talking about. You felt overwhelmed, maybe by the options, the ever changing nature of the challenge once you started taking action, and then how you reacted emotionally and what that did to your mindset and how that mindset impacted the actions you kept on taking. I bet you can probably think of a time or two when that overwhelm caused you to maybe even give up on pursuing a goal or solving or tackling a big challenge. And you know what, who could blame you? I mean, it's a very human thing to do. It's just, gosh, there's just so much here. I don't know if I have it in me. Right? It's that kind of thinking. When it comes to the hard sciences, let's kind of think through how humans are able to solve big problems. And in hard sciences such as medicine, physics, biology, astronomy, when you're trying to solve a big problem, you need to come up with a viable hypothesis that you can test using the scientific method. And this is how humanity has solved some of the most important problems in history. And it's the reason life is so much better today than it was just 200 or 300 years ago. But when it comes to these fields of science, your hypothesis needs to be reasonable. You need to have a pretty good hypothesis if you're going to spend the time testing it. It shouldn't be way out there. It has to be worth testing. It has to be viable. You can't just say, and this is just an extreme example, but I want to make sure you understand where I'm going with this. You can't just say, hey, I wonder if I could get to Mars by putting on a scuba suit, oxygen tanks, and strapping on a jetpack. And I mean, I guess you could test the hypothesis, but it would be foolish to do so. Right? Scientific experiments, going after something like this, testing it, trying it, is very expensive. It could be very risky. So you should limit the hypotheses you test to the ones that seem to be the most reasonable and most logical. I found that that's not the case. That's not the kind of thinking or the approach that we should take when solving big, complex problems in our business. Solving the kinds of problems you and I are working on every week to improve our businesses require a different approach. The problems are still complex. But if you adopt that same kind of realistic thinking the scientists use, you will hamper your creative problem solving process. And that's because in hard sciences, you need to be able to reasonably predict how an experiment might unfold now. You need to prove it, you need to test it right, know it might unfold very differently. And that's because you're working in a realm of concrete physical laws, laws that govern and limit the set of possibilities you'll get. So, for instance, when we sent men to the moon, I mean, we had to be pretty sure about what happened. We've never tried it before, but based on the laws of physics and based on some testing we could do here on Earth, we knew what we needed to do with a fair degree of confidence that those things would work. And in business and in social sciences, I found that you're dealing with humans, you're dealing with emotions, you're not dealing with concrete laws of physics. And that just exponentially expands the set of possibilities that you might get when you're trying new approaches and you're trying to go after big goals or trying to solve complex problems. It's a different beast than getting a crew to the moon or to Mars to get him back home safely. I'm not saying that those are not complex problems, obviously. Those are extremely complex problems where you're dealing with a different set of laws. At least that's my perception. I'm not here to try to prove this in a scientific setting, but my perception, my experience has been that these are two very different, different types of complex problems. When we're going after something big in our business, we're trying to get somewhere much better. We're trying to solve a big challenge. You don't have to see the entire path ahead of you and ahead of time before embarking on that path like you would when trying to plan how you would get a crew of five people to Mars and back safely. In fact, waiting to try new ideas and methods Just because you can't See exactly how they will work and how everything will unfold step by step. That's probably the worst thing you can do in your business. Yet that's what we typically expect. That's what we typically do. And that's why we never move on some of our biggest challenges. That's why we never start taking action, because it's just so difficult to see how this will unfold step by step. There's a great saying out there. I've seen it attributed to Martin Luther King, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's something to the effect of, you don't have to see the full staircase. You just have to take the first step and faith. And that's much more elegant and eloquent, I guess, description of what I'm trying to share with you here. But at the same time, we know this, that that kind of thinking resonates with us. But I see coaching clients try to do the opposite all the time. And you know what? I do it myself. So I know from experience that this is the human thing to do. I will personally fail to act trying to tackle a big problem because I tell myself that I have to imagine exactly how this new idea or effort will give me the result I want. So rather than launching a very creative marketing campaign, for example, because in my mind it could fail, I sit around mulling over all the potential outcomes, and I keep thinking and rethinking how it might unfold step by step. And I mean, that just makes my head hurt, right? So my brain says, you know what? Stop thinking. Go to something else. Check your phone, check your email. And what happens is, weeks will go by and I haven't done a darn thing. Maybe because I'm scared or I'm confused or overwhelmed by how to deploy the idea. And next thing I know, I'm way behind on my income goals. Nothing has happened. I didn't get a result. Now I didn't fail either. I guess I didn't fall flat on my face. But, you know, in a way, I failed because I didn't take action. You don't have to magically forecast exactly how a new idea or effort will unfold. And that's impossible to do. So hopefully I've shown you that. And in our world, you're much better off developing a good sense of when that idea is good enough to try and then just try it out, test it, get out there, take a chance. In fact, I'd say that some of my biggest breakthroughs in business came as a result of taking Those kinds of risks and just letting go of the idea that I have to know exactly how something's going to unfold before I move in that direction again. You don't have to see the full staircase. You just have to take the first step in faith. And you know what? It doesn't really matter. When you have and adopt that mindset, and you maintain that mindset throughout the whole process, you, even if you don't get the outcome you want, you learn so much. And not just learn, it makes you a different person. It changes you if you let it. If you let it, it makes you better. It makes you more confident, more resilient. Okay? So don't underestimate the value of going after something in faith, even if you can't see the full staircase. And that brings up another important point, the point of blind spots. Have you ever almost run someone off the road because you switch lanes without first checking your vehicle's blind spot? I mean, I know I have more than once, but. Pretty scary thing. And just like blind spots around your car. We all have blind spots. In our business, we think we have a full, complete picture of our challenges and opportunities, but for the most part, we do. But there's still blind spots. We all have them, and we don't notice them because our brain tricks us into thinking that we have the full picture, that we're not overlooking everything. And we're always considering all the variables and scenarios and possibilities. And that's what makes those blind spots so dangerous, the fact that we don't see or acknowledge them. Of course, I'm talking metaphorically here. And when we're going after bringing it back to goals, big goals, solving complex problems, when we're in that situation. The problem with blind spots is that they almost always get in our way. We're too close to our own problems and our standard way of thinking. And we see the problems because of that, and we see the solutions differently. And in order to make the kind of improvement we really want, we have to understand those blind spots and kind of get around them and get some help in seeing what maybe we're not considering now. Again, these are metaphorical blind spots. But here's the interesting thing. There are real blind spots in life, and I want to prove it to you. So here's what I want you to do. If you're somewhere where you have access to a phone or a computer and you're not driving or doing something that requires your full attention, I invite you to hit pause on this audio right now, and I'll Tell you when in a second. But I'm going to give you some instructions first. And I want you to go online and search for the term blind spot illusion. Okay. And then just click on any of the results. One of the ones that came up for me that I clicked on was brainfacts.org okay. So if you see that one, I'm sure they're all going to do the same thing. The instructions are simple, and in fact, I'm just going to go ahead and give you a chance to go ahead and pause the audio and then come back. Okay. So hopefully you found something and you already saw what happened. If you follow the instructions, you basically have two objects on the screen. You need to cover your left eye and keep your focus on the object that's on the left while moving closer and closer to the screen. And as you do this, you'll eventually notice that the object on the right magically disappears. It's really weird when you try that, so I urge you to give it a shot. If you're somewhere right now where you can't do it, make a mental note to look this up. Why does this happen? Well, the cells in the retina, where the optic nerve connect to the brain cannot collect light. So at that point, you can't see whatever is happening there. And that's what's happening all the time when you have your eyes open. This is what I found really surprising. You literally have blind spots every day when your eyes are open, and you won't even notice. So there are basically black spots there. There's a void, but you don't even notice. And the amazing part of all this is that rather than walking around all day with those two dark spots in front of you, which would be, of course, incredibly annoying, I'm glad we don't notice them, because what the brain does is it has adapted to the point where it just fills those spots for you based on the surrounding environment. So on a computer screen, it just fills that black spot with, let's say, the white color from the screen, or if you're out on a hike, it just fills it with some green. So you can't even tell, right, that there's dark spots there. It just takes the surrounding environment, let's say, of green trees or bushes, and it just kind of fills that in. When it comes to our own business, we do the same thing. We fill those gaps with whatever truth we want to believe. So rather than acknowledging these blind spots, we just ignore them. And the reason we do that is not because we're ignorant. It's not because we're stubborn. We don't even realize they're there. We don't even see them. I'm telling you this, I know this intellectually, and I still have blind spots, and I don't even realize it. I don't even know what's behind those blind spots. Okay? So knowing it is part of solving the problem. But really, even if you're aware of it, it doesn't mean that they're going to go away. Just like those blind spots are not going to go away in real life just because you're aware of it and you know that your brain is tricking you by filling those little gaps. So this is one big reason why it helps to work with a coach or a mentor or to regularly tap friends and trusted colleagues for feedback and advice, because very often they can easily see things we cannot. Okay? Just like in real life, if there's something in your blind spot, if you have a passenger in your car and you're about to switch over to the other lane thinking that it's clear because your side mirror doesn't show a car, but you have a passenger says, hey, wait a minute, there's a car right there. Don't turn, don't switch to the lane, don't move to the other lane. Your other person, your passenger, can see what you can't see. But it all starts by recognizing that all of us have these blind spots. Nobody's immune from them, and it's nothing to be embarrassed about. Once we know they're there, we can seek feedback and guidance to help us fill those gaps more effectively. And that leads me to my final insight, and that is the importance of, as I mentioned early in this episode, the importance of taking time to think more deeply about problems and how to solve them. These days, it's just so easy to get caught up in being crazy busy client projects, marketing your services, running your business, taking care of your family, spending time on hobbies, social time with friends, visiting relatives, fixing things around the house, keeping up with the yard. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And the strange thing is, no matter how much time we might free up, that new vacuum we've created of free time gets sucked up immediately by some other new task or project, sometimes by design, other times by default. I have a friend who last night told me that he got laid off a few days ago, and he said that within hours he already had a to do list from his wife on things he needs to fix around the house. Over the next few weeks. So suddenly he found himself having what he thought might be at least a month of free time. And that vacuum was immediately filled. And this is why I find productivity books and courses, hacks and apps are so popular. Because it seems like no matter what we seem to do to free up time, there's just never enough of it. As soon as we gain a couple of hours for ourselves, something else comes up to fill that time and before we know it, the day is over. Or it's already Friday afternoon. Or that month that we thought we were going to have to kind of lounge around and relax has been filled with activities and to do lists. Or the year that was supposed to be your turnaround year is more than halfway over. There's a very effective way to break the cycle, and it's somewhat counterintuitive. So rather than filling up your days and weeks with nonstop projects, tasks and activities, I'm not saying don't do them, but I suggest carving out some time every week for deep thinking. Now that can take whatever form you'd like. You could just sit on a comfortable chair for half an hour and just think about an issue or a problem. Or you could pull out your journal and give yourself a couple of thought provoking prompts. Or you could listen to a thoughtful discussion on a podcast and just hit pause and think through those ideas, take them apart and ask yourself how you could implement an element of those ideas. That's one of my favorite ways to do it is rather than. I mean, I do like to sit there and just kind of daydream, but many times I like using some kind of prompt and a podcast or really interesting book or article can give me those prompts. And then I'll sit with my journal or with sheet of paper and I'll just start mind mapping and just kind of free thinking just on paper. In a recent podcast episode with Brene Brown, Charles Duhigg, who's the author of several great books, but I guess most recently Smarter, Faster, Better Said, and I quote, the greatest productivity app is Thinking More Deeply. Wow. I agree wholeheartedly with that. Never before has humanity had this much comfort, prosperity and free time. In fact, according to Steven Pinker and his amazing book Enlighten now, men today enjoy 42 hours of leisure time every week, which is 10 more hours than men had 50 years ago. And women on average report having 36 hours of leisure time per week, more than six hours than they had 50 years ago. So we have more time, but we spend less of that time thinking we're too Lazy to engage in deep thought and meaningful and stimulating conversations and listen, I'm just as guilty as anybody else. It's very tempting to move on to the next thing. We live, especially in the west and especially in North America, we live in a culture of do, do, do, work, work, work, and taking time to just kind of sit there and think or just write. Stream of consciousness. That's not something our society really values or encourages. I know one of my natural instincts when I think about doing that is there's this little voice in my head that says, oh, don't be lazy. You got other things you need to do, more important things. But again, how many other things in your work could be more important than. Than deep thought? There are a lot of important things, granted. How many of them are urgent? Maybe they're urgent, not that important. Unfortunately, deep thinking falls into Stephen Covey's Quadrant 2, the important but not urgent. And these are the things we tend to put off, things we tend to ignore. I would even argue that we spend less time today thinking through challenges, issues and ideas than our grandparents did. They didn't have the distractions. They may have had to spend more time working, they may have had less free time, they may have had a harder life, but they spent more time thinking. I know my grandparents did. And I could tell because of the conversations that we had. I grew up with my grandparents, with all four of them, and these are all of them. All four of them were great thinkers. Great thinkers. You could tell that they just daydreamed, that they kind of processed their thoughts continually. They consumed great information and they had great discussions with their peers, which, by the way, and that's a topic for another podcast episode. But we've lost the art of great, thoughtful conversation. And unfortunately, at least in the US today, we are so polarized that the self censorship that has to happen when we have conversations, even with good friends, even with relatives, it's kind of shameful that we have to hold back that much, because I think we're missing out on the gift and the joy of interesting, thoughtful Socratic conversation. I really miss that we thought more deeply, more often maybe, rather than just except. Whatever neatly packaged information was handed down to us would be healthier, happier, and better prepared to face whatever challenges come our way. And we might even be better equipped to deal with the business, personal and societal problems the world is facing today. Problems that require not just more thinking time, but also a different level of thinking. Maybe deep thinking truly is the greatest productivity app ever invented. So, in closing, here are My big ideas for today Recognizing many of our most important business problems are truly complex. That really goes first. You know, this is a different category of problems. We're not trying to figure out what to eat for lunch. We're trying to figure out how to grow our income by 30% or how to get more recurring work from clients. Next, not giving up on tackling these complex problems just because we can't see the entire path forward. Also accepting the fact that we all have blind spots. And very often it's those blind spots that keep us from achieving the kind of breakthroughs we want. And the importance of thinking time. We have the available time to do so. Okay, Nobody can tell me I don't have time for that. Anyone can carve out 30 minutes a week to do so, especially if you understand the importance of it. We just have to make it a priority and we have to develop the habit. This has been Ed Gandia I hope you enjoyed this episode, and if you did, I have a quick favor to ask of you. It's something I haven't asked for you from you in a while. If you haven't done so before, would you mind leaving me a two or three sentence rating and review on Apple Podcasts? It would mean the world to me, and it truly does help expose the show to more listeners. The more reviews, the more ratings a podcast has, the more it's shown and exposed to people who might find it useful. Thank you for considering that and I hope you have an excellent rest of your day. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Burn More in Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.