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A problem you've carried for more than a year isn't a problem anymore. It's a decision you keep making.
You already know which one I mean.
Think Big Minute #39
The hire you should have let go 14 months ago. The client who drains your team and pays late. The pricing you've known for a year is too low. The conversation with your business partner you keep not having.
You've named it. You've complained about it. You may have paid someone to advise you on it.
And it's still here.
Somewhere around the one year mark, a problem quietly stops being something that happened to you. It becomes something you are choosing.
The problems that finally get fixed were almost never mysteries.
When Alan Mulally took over Ford in 2006, the company was headed for a loss of more than $12 billion that year. He ran weekly meetings where executives marked every part of the business red, yellow, or green. For weeks, every executive reported everything green. A company losing twelve billion dollars, and the whole room was green. The problems weren't unknown. They were undiscussable. The day Mark Fields finally showed a red item, Mulally applauded him. Ford became the only American carmaker that didn't take a government bailout.
Domino's spent years knowing their pizza had a reputation problem. Customers said it tasted like cardboard. The company knew. They competed on speed and price and left the actual product alone. Then in 2010, under Patrick Doyle, they admitted it out loud in their own ads and reformulated the recipe. The stock was under ten dollars. It became one of the best performing stocks of the entire decade.
Lego was near bankruptcy in 2004. Not from a surprise. They had spent years overextending into theme parks, video games, and too many product lines, and they knew the core was drifting. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp took over and made the decisions that had been sitting there unmade. Cut the lines. Sell the parks. Go back to the brick. Lego became one of the most profitable toy companies in the world.
None of those were solved by new information.
Ford knew. Domino's knew. Lego knew. The problem in every case had been in plain sight for years. What changed was not knowledge. Somebody decided.
Here's what's actually going on.
A problem you keep long enough stops looking like a problem.
Furniture.
You stop seeing it. You arrange the day around it. You build little workarounds and little stories so you never have to bump into it. After a while you would almost feel strange if it were gone.
That is the tell. A problem that has become furniture is not unsolved. It has been re-chosen. Every morning you woke up, saw it, and kept it one more day.
You didn't fail to fix it. You voted to keep it.
About 365 times.
I've kept problems as furniture. I'm not writing this from the outside.
For years Legiit had a marketing problem I could describe in detail in any meeting you put me in. I knew it. I tried one fix. It didn't work, and after that I mostly stopped trying. I told myself I was being patient and waiting for the right person.
Patient was a generous word for it.
What was actually happening is that every real fix meant a hard, expensive change I didn't want to make yet. So I kept the problem and renamed the keeping.
I can tell you the year it stopped being a problem and became a decision. It was years before I admitted that. I just didn't want to know.
Here's why this is so easy to do and so hard to see.
A problem you've had for a year doesn't hurt the way a new one does. The pain is low and steady and predictable. You've adapted to it like a sound in the house you stopped hearing.
The fix is the opposite. The fix has a sharp, upfront cost. The hard conversation. The firing. The revenue you lose the month you drop the bad client. The moment you admit you were wrong for a year.
A steady ache against a sharp cost. People pick the steady ache almost every time. Not because they can't do the math. Because the ache is quiet and the cost is loud.
There's a second reason, and it's the one nobody says out loud.
The problem is useful. As long as it exists, it's the reason. The reason the business isn't bigger. The reason the numbers are flat. The reason you're tired. Fix it, and the reason is gone, and the only thing standing where the reason used to be is you.
A problem you've kept for years is paying rent. It pays in excuses.
And the help on offer rarely names this, because almost everyone who could help you is selling a solution. A system, a tool, a hire, a course. Those things are real and they work, when the problem is a true gap in knowledge or resources. But a problem you've carried for over a year is rarely a knowledge gap. You already know the fix. You've known for months. It's a willingness gap. Nobody keeps willingness on a shelf to sell you.
Stop trying to solve it.
Pick the date you stop keeping it.
Think Big
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