Stop Asking How. Start Asking Who.

The more experience you get, the more patterns you start to recognize.

You see a problem and think, I’ve seen this before. I know how to solve it.

That feels like mastery.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it is also how you become the bottleneck.

Because once you become the person who knows how to solve everything, every problem starts routing through you.

Every decision needs your input.

Every fire becomes yours to put out.

I built a business like that for years.

I thought leadership meant being the guy who could solve anything.

Then I started thinking about it differently.

There are two ways to keep a business fed.

You can be the guy with the fishing rod, out every day catching what you need for today.

Or you can be the guy off to the side building a net.

At first, the guy building the net does not look very productive.

Everyone else is catching fish while he is working on something that is not producing much of anything.

Then the net is finished.

Suddenly he can catch far more than he ever could with a rod.

For years, I was the rod guy.

I got really good at solving problems quickly.

But I never stopped to ask whether solving every problem myself was actually the best use of me.

I kept asking, “How do I get better at this?”

The better question was, “Who should actually be doing this?”

That question shows up everywhere in business.

Bookkeeping.

Marketing.

Operations.

That system nobody really owns.

That task you keep saying you will eventually get better at.

Most of us default to “how” because it feels responsible.

Figure it out.

Learn the skill.

Get better.

Sometimes that makes sense.

But sometimes figuring it out yourself is just a slower way of avoiding the better question.

So pick one thing you are stuck on right now.

Ask, “How do I solve this?”

Then ask, “Who already knows how?”

You may be surprised how often “who” gets you there faster than “how.”