Robert Nikic: What Your Problem Is Trying to Tell You | Problems Pay Audiobook, Ch. 5

The first question I ask about any problem is one word: why? Not "Who did this?" Not "How do I make it go away?" Why. And when I ask it, I already know where I'm going to look first. In the mirror.

Problems Pay. What No One Taught Men About Handling Problems, and How to Make Every One of Them Pay. Written by Robert Nikic. Narrated by Robert Nikic. Published by Robert Nikic LLC. Chapter 5: What This Is Telling You. Where you are: Move 3 of 6, Find the root. The first question I ask about any problem is one word: why? Not "Who did this?"

Not "How do I make it go away?" Why. And when I ask it, I already know where I'm going to look first. In the mirror. Don't blame the partner. Don't blame the client. Don't blame the market, the economy or the employee who didn't follow through. Don't blame anyone but yourself. I know how that sounds, and I know the objection, because I hear it every time: sometimes it really is the other person.

Fine. Sometimes it is. Then ask yourself who chose that person. Who gave them the responsibility? Who signed off on the plan and stayed when the signs were there? You did. You're the one who delegated it to them. I don't care if you're sitting back as an investor while everyone else does the work. You delegated the responsibility, so the question is still yours.

That's not about guilt. It's about control. If the root of the problem is somebody else, you're stuck waiting for them to change. If the root is a decision you made, you can make a different one tomorrow morning. One of those positions has power in it. The other one is a waiting room. It also has a bill. Blame feels free, and it's one of the most expensive habits in this book, because a problem you've pinned on someone else never gets handled, so it never stops charging. Finding the root is the first thing a problem ever pays you.

It tells you what it actually is, and you can't price a problem you haven't read. Why Men Reach for Blame. I've thought a lot about why blame comes so fast, and it isn't because the men doing it are irresponsible people. It's because they want to look, to the people they love and the people they work with, like someone who makes the right decisions. Blame is a way of protecting that picture. They think that by shifting it, they'll keep the narrative going. In practice they accomplish the exact opposite, and it spirals down from there. People respect leaders who take responsibility and accountability. Not everyone is right, and not everyone has the capacity to acknowledge when they aren't.

The ones who do are the ones people follow. And the difference between a leader and everyone else is whether he brings a solution along with the problem he just owned. The quicker you can answer the why, the quicker you can address the problem. Blame doesn't just cost you respect. It costs you time, because every minute spent assigning fault is a minute the root goes unfound. Two Kinds of Failure, Two Questions. In Chapter 3 I talked about the failures that come from outside you: a war, an economy, a driver who runs a light. Those tell you which way to turn. But most of the problems you'll deal with this week aren't that kind.

They're internal: the fear, the doubt, the burnout, the battles inside your own head. Internal failure is feedback. Treat it that way. Don't fear the sting of it. Listen to it, and ask one question: what is this teaching me? The moment you ask that, failure stops being an enemy and starts working for you like a personal coach who's seen every one of your games. Here's how I know the difference between a man who asks that question and a man who doesn't. The second man has the same problem three times in six months and is confused about why it keeps happening. So I ask him what he did about it each time.

Almost always, the answer is the same thing, three times. It's not about trying again. It's about how you respond. And the same response is not going to change your outcome. Failure Is A B Testing. Let me give you the business word for this, because it changed how I look at every failure I've ever had. In business, when you don't know which version of something works, you run both and let the results decide. Version A, version B. That's an A B test.

Nobody calls an A B test a failure when version A loses. It's the point of the test. I failed in a lot of ventures before anything worked. For years I thought of those as losses. Now I know exactly what they were: A B tests. Each one told me what didn't work, with whom, and why. And here's the part the motivational speakers get right even when they say it badly: it doesn't matter how many it takes before it works. It only has to work once. I A B test everything.

If I made 300 phone calls and heard no for weeks, I wouldn't keep reading the same script and blaming the people on the other end. I'd switch the angle every five calls until something landed. The no's aren't the problem. They're the data. Life works the same way. If you're having the same argument with the same person over and over, look at what an argument actually is. It's an emotional reaction to disagreement, or to a lack of understanding. And what is agreeing? Agreeing is simply understanding.

So the fix isn't winning the argument. It's changing how you go about understanding the other person. Different response. Different outcome. Opinions Are Data, But Only If You Collect Them Right. People say "get feedback" like it's simple. It isn't, because most men collect feedback the wrong way. Ask five people the same question and they'll probably give you the same answer. That's not because they're right.

It's because they're in the same little cohort. Same background, same information, same blind spots. They simply don't know any better. If you want opinions to be data, spread yourself wide. Ask people who don't think like you, don't live like you and don't want what you want. And when someone you trust tells you your idea is bad, remember what that is. It's one person. One person in the market. I learned this early.

When I decided to go after a boring, everyday product that everyone uses, people looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Who gets excited about that? Nobody. That was the point. A lot of entrepreneurs fail because they want to sell what they want to sell, the exciting thing, the thing they like. Nobody cares what you like. The question is what the market wants, and the market was telling me, loudly, that it wanted the boring thing. The laughter was one opinion. The market was millions of them.

Because the market is just people. Your customers are a market. Your team is a market. Your family is a market. And the question is always the same: where are problems developing because you've stopped paying attention to the people you serve? The Teacher Who Asked Me for a Job. Here's a problem read correctly, from my own life, and then I'll hand you the reader's version. I finished high school on the dean's list and went to community college because my parents wanted me to, and when your parents have given up what mine did, you go. I was running my ventures the whole time, working on them in the back of the computer science class while the lecture ran.

One day the teacher wanted to know more about what I was doing. We talked. At the end of that conversation she asked whether I'd be willing to employ her. I was already profitable by then. What was that telling me? My own teacher, inside the institution I was paying to attend, saw more value in what I was building in the back of her classroom than in what she was being paid to teach in the front of it. If that was true, what was I doing there? I went home, and within twenty-four hours I quit my job at the hotel and dropped out, and built my ventures full time from that day on. I thank that teacher.

It took courage to ask a student that question. I'll come back to the moment in Chapter 10, because I did something unusual with it. Now your version. The signal is almost never that dramatic, and that's exactly why men miss it. It's the customer who asks if he can buy from you directly instead of through your employer. It's the colleague who keeps coming to you with questions your manager should be able to answer. It's the friend who asks you to look at his finances because you're the only one he trusts with money, while you sit in a job that has nothing to do with money. It's your wife telling you that you're a different man on the weekends than you are on Sunday night. None of those is a compliment to file away.

Each is a piece of information about where your life is already producing value and where it isn't, and about where you've stopped paying attention. Don't ask whose fault it is. Ask why it's telling you this, and what it would mean to believe it. The Objection, Answered Once More. "Sometimes it really is the other person." I've heard this from men who were cheated by partners, lied to by clients and let down by people they trusted. Some of them were right about the facts. Here's what I tell them anyway. Even then, you chose them.

You delegated to them. You stayed when the signs were there. I'm not saying that to pile blame on a man who's already hurting. I'm saying it because it's the only version of the story where you get to do something. Blame the other person and you've handed them your whole future: you can't move until they change, and they're not going to. Own your part, even if it's twenty percent, and you've found the one piece of the problem you can fix by tomorrow morning. Where You Stopped Paying Attention. Every problem is telling you where you stopped paying attention. That's the sentence I want you to carry out of this chapter.

The partner who let you down is telling you where you stopped paying attention to who you were choosing. The customer who left is telling you where you stopped paying attention to what the market wanted. The same argument for the fifth time is telling you where you stopped paying attention to understanding the person across from you. That's good news. Attention is free, and it's entirely yours. The Rule, Again. Every problem has a price, and every problem pays. The payment for finding the root is that you only have to solve the problem once. Blame someone else and you'll be paying for the same problem on a monthly plan.

The debt: Blame someone else and you keep the problem, and you pay for it again every time it comes back. The payment: Find the root and you pay once. Say it out loud: "Why? And the answer isn't someone else." Do this today: Pick one problem that keeps coming back. Write down the solution you keep using. Then change one thing about it. Not everything. One thing.

That's an A B test, and you've just started your first one. Once you know why, you can do the thing most men never do with a problem: put a number on it.