Why You’re Addicted to Solutions (And Why Better Questions Matter More)

As Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “The great challenge in life is knowing enough to think you’re right, but not enough to know you’re wrong.” That line has stuck with me for years because I have fallen victim to it and watch others do it everyday.

I’ve years a lot of time working with entrepreneurs. Passionate, smart, focused, driven people. And one of the patterns I see over and over is how confidence in one area quietly bleeds into areas where they have no expertise at all. You can hear it in the language. “You should just…” followed by whatever solution feels obvious to them. Rebrand. Hire a salesperson. Build an app. The conviction is real. The understanding of the actual problem usually isn’t.

It always rubs me the wrong way when I hear it, mostly because I know I do it too.

Experience teaches you that you know how to do a thing. Wisdom teaches you not to assume your past is the answer to a future problem. And the gap between those two is where most bad decisions live.

The Reflex That Got You Here

Here’s what makes this tricky. If you’re mid-career and reasonably successful, you got here because you’re a fast problem-solver. You’re the person who walks into a meeting, sizes up the situation, and has a direction before anyone else has finished talking. That instinct was rewarded for years. It’s the reason you’re in the room.

But the problems you’re facing now aren’t the kind that yield to fast answers. They’re ambiguous, layered, political. The same reflex that made you valuable as an individual contributor — solve it, ship it, move on — starts misfiring when the problems get more complex. You find yourself fixing symptoms while the real issue keeps regenerating underneath.

You’re not failing because you’re not smart enough. You’re failing because you’re applying a skill that used to work to a category of problem where it doesn’t.

It’s Not About Competence. It’s About Identity.

If the solving reflex were just a habit, it would be easy to break. Slow down, ask more questions, done. But it’s not a habit. It’s an identity. Being the person with the answer is how a lot of us know who we are in a room. Take that away and there’s a disorienting moment of then what am I contributing?

Having kids who reach adulthood is the great equalizer here. There comes a point where you cannot be the smartest person in the room anymore because your children know things you don’t. You have to make the shift from the person with the answer to the person who asks the right question and then gets out of the way. Some parents make that transition gracefully. A lot of them struggle with it for years.

What’s interesting is that many of the same people who can manage this shift at work — who can defer to a specialist, admit they don’t know something, ask for input — cannot do it with their own kids. Which tells you the problem was never really about competence. It’s about what it means to you to be the one who knows.

What “Don’t Bring Me Problems” Actually Means

There’s a phrase that’s become gospel in a lot of organizations: “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” On the surface it sounds like good leadership. Empowering. Solution-oriented.

I’ve come to believe it’s mostly about vulnerability.

Most of the time when I hear someone say that, it has nothing to do with wanting solution-oriented employees. It means someone doesn’t want to hear about a problem they may have caused, or a pattern they haven’t addressed, or a failure that sits uncomfortably close to their decisions. The instruction sounds proactive. What it actually communicates is: don’t make me look at something I’m not ready to look at.

And the downstream effect is predictable. People start showing up with half-baked solutions — not because they’ve done the thinking, but because they’re afraid of being berated for having a problem they can’t completely solve on their own. So the organization ends up with a steady stream of premature answers to poorly understood questions. Everyone looks busy. Nothing actually gets fixed.

The solving reflex, scaled to a culture.

What It Looks Like to Stop

I’m much more likely now to stop a conversation that’s headed down a solution path when I don’t believe the room is actually addressing the real problem. Not because the solution is bad. Sometimes it’s a perfectly good solution. It’s just aimed at the wrong thing.

It’s like building a giant ladder and leaning it against the wrong building. Sure, you started climbing. You might even get to the top. But you’re at the wrong destination.

The shift isn’t from solving to not solving. It’s from solving first to understanding first. And the uncomfortable part is that understanding takes longer, feels less productive, and doesn’t give you that dopamine hit of having the answer. You have to be willing to sit in the problem for a while. That’s not a skill most organizations reward, and it’s not an instinct most high-performers have developed, because everything in their career has trained them in the opposite direction.

But the people I’ve watched navigate complex problems well — really well, not just impressively fast — are almost always the ones who resisted the reflex long enough to make sure they were solving the right thing. They didn’t bring the best answer. They brought the best question. And the answer that eventually emerged felt less like a clever fix and more like something inevitable.

The Question Behind the Question

The next time you feel that rush of certainty — the “you should just” moment — treat it as a signal, not a solution. That confidence is worth examining before it’s worth acting on. Ask yourself whether you’re solving a problem you actually understand, or solving the version of the problem that lets you feel competent the fastest.

Experience is an asset. But it becomes a liability the moment you stop checking whether the situation in front of you is actually the one you’ve seen before. The past is a reference, not an answer. And the distance between those two is where your best thinking lives.