The One Thing Underneath

A founder I spoke with recently had built a significant business with multiple, high-ticket revenue streams over a decade. A deep thinker, introspective, and always growing, he had personally evolved. As a consequence he also felt disconnected from aspects of this business.

He arrived with what looked like a dozen problems. What he shouldn't do any more. What to call the work. How to package it. Which offer to lead with. Whether the brand he'd built was the right vehicle, or should be retired.

Each problem had its own logic, felt very real, and each had resisted being solved for a long time. The longer these problems existed, the more problems they manifested.

(That's the thing with unresolved problems. It's like leaving your sink leaking. Now we have the problem of buying a bucket. What size? Where from? How often do we empty it?)

We didn't solve any of these problems. I've gotten attuned to what are symptoms, or problems as a result of problems; and I won't solve those.

We went looking instead for the one thing underneath, and found it quickly. The work he actually did, across every engagement, came down to a single philosophy he could draw on a napkin. He'd known and evolved this for years. He'd just never seen how it could be, and hold, the whole thing.

Naming it changed almost nothing, and changed everything. The dozen problems didn't get solved; they stopped being problems. The naming question dissolved; the thing already had a name. The packaging question dissolved; you don't package a philosophy, you state it.

What had felt like a wide field of decisions turned out to be one decision he'd already made, but mis-applied.

This is what I mean by leverage. A fulcrum, found. The same man, the same work, the same week, but the energy that had been spread thin across the whole surface now had a single point to act on.

Most of what followed was subtraction. Removing the half-built offers and the structures added over the years to compensate for a problem never quite located. A business carrying one misalignment produces many symptoms, and the symptoms are what you can see and feel from the inside. The misalignment itself, you usually need someone outside the thing to point at.

Then it all cohered.

Having clarity is seeing everything collapse into a single resolution, a coherence. And just as problems breed problems, clarity can breed more clarity. The burden lifts, things click, a fire is lit, and direction is established. Trajectory is set. From that point, a person can finally move. And a small push, in the right place, carries further than years of force.