It Turns Out
The printer isn’t working. It must need ink.
The car won’t start. The stupid battery is probably dead.
Nobody replied to the email. They must not be interested.
The website isn’t generating leads. I guess nobody needs this service.
My laptop is running incredibly slow. It’s probably time for a new one.
Most of us do this kind of thing every day.
We run into a problem, our brains look for the most likely explanation, and we move on. Most of the time, that’s useful. We don’t have the time or energy to investigate every little thing that goes wrong.
Sometimes what we tell ourselves is absolutely correct.
But sometimes… we’re wrong.
Turns out the printer was trying to print to a different printer.
Turns out the battery was fine and the car needed gas.
Turns out the email landed in a spam folder.
Turns out the contact form stopped working three months ago.
Turns out the laptop just needed a restart.
Neither the assumptions nor the actual explanations are particularly dramatic.
But once we’ve accepted our own story, it’s really easy to stop looking. We stop asking questions and move forward as though we know what has happened.
Sometimes the problem isn’t the problem we’ve decided it is.
We say the website isn’t generating leads because nobody needs the service. But maybe visitors aren’t sure what the service includes.
We say our business isn’t growing. But maybe it’s growing through referrals and nobody has noticed.
We say customers don’t value the service. But maybe they simply need an easier way to tell us that they do.
Most of this is pretty ordinary.
But now, before I spend money, change direction, or give up on something that used to work, I try to remember to ask myself a different question.
Do I actually know?
Not what I think.
Not what seems likely.
Not even what’s wrong.
Just: Do I actually know?
Sometimes the answer is yes.
Sometimes I need more information.
Sometimes I need a different perspective.
And more often than I’d like to admit, it turns out I haven’t found the actual problem yet.
