What Problem are you Trying to Solve?

Do this before adding anything new to improve your life.

Stop adding things to your life until you can answer this: What problem am I trying to solve?

In Thursday’s Two Percent episode with David Epstein—author of the new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better—we talked about problems.

How problems aren’t always bad. In fact, they’re critical to making improvements.

David pointed out that the best companies in the world solve a problem. Smartphones sucked, so Apple raised the game with the iPhone. Coolers kept stuff cold for a few hours, so Yeti made one that can hold ice for two days.

If a company can’t solve a problem, they fail. Heads roll. Investors lose their money.

But we rarely apply that same logic to our own lives.

I see this often in the wellness space: We hear of something new and flashy—take X supplement, do Y routine, adopt Z hack—and then we try it. Adding new things feels like progress.

And then … nothing happens. The “results” mean nothing. They waste time, money, and effort that could be used more effectively elsewhere.

I went on a tangent—call it a rant if you will. Here’s the 2-minute clip:

What I didn’t say in the episode is that I learned this the hard way more than a decade ago.

• P.S. Listen to the full episode here

Housekeeping:

• As a reminder, here’s how Two Percent works: Monday posts are always free. But only Members get full access to our Wednesday and Friday posts. Become a Member to get full access to proven, no-BS tools to improve your health, mindset, and performance.

• In case you missed it:

  • On Monday, a Harvard and Hopkins-trained doctor wrote about the comfort crisis in the doctor’s office. It’s likely impacting your health.

  • On Wednesday, we looked at a simple way of eating that created some of the leanest, most disease-free populations on earth (backed by multiple studies).

  • Listen to Two Percent, the champagne of podcasts. Last week we ran two useful episodes: one that explains how to engineer your environment to live and work better, the other with David on constraints.

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So … back to how I learned this the hard way: I was chatting with Dr. Trevor Kashey, who I wrote about in The Comfort Crisis.

I told him I was thinking about stopping eating after 6 p.m. because of a study I’d read about fasting.

“What problem are you trying to solve?” he asked.

I hummed and hawed and eventually admitted, “I don’t know, Trevor—what are you getting at?”

“Remember my question moving forward,” Trevor said. “Before deciding on the details of any intervention—whether it is a health recommendation, or a new product or strategy anywhere in your life—you must clearly define the problem it addresses.”

Oftentimes, we don’t actually have a problem. In my case, I felt good. My weight was where I wanted it to be. My health markers were solid, and I was fit enough. I’d just been captured by some sparkly new study I read.

In your case, you might think a supplement will improve your sleep. But before you buy it, ask yourself: Do you actually sleep poorly? If you’re getting between six and eight hours a night and not nodding off in the day, there’s no problem. You’d just be adding noise and wasting money. (Read more on how to diagnose whether your sleep is actually bad here.)

Or maybe you want to build more muscle. Do you have any real evidence that you’re lacking enough for your goals? Or did you just read some random stat about muscle loss and all-cause mortality and mentally spiral?

Sometimes, we will identify a real problem. From there, the next question becomes whether the intervention you’re drawn to is actually the best fix.

If your sleep is off, is the supplement the right move—or do you just need to stop watching anxiety-inducing Dateline episodes at 10pm? If your muscle is legitimately low and affecting your life, do you need to megadose creatine, or just lift weights an extra day each week and eat a little more?

The supplement or the protocol might be the right answer. But you won’t know until you’ve done the work of naming the problem first, then searching for the most obvious solutions.

Have fun, don’t die, what problem are you trying to solve?

-Michael

P.S., today’s letter was a new experiment in writing slightly shorter letters to get you the “takeaway” quicker. Let me know in the comments if you appreciate the brevity. If yes, I’ll do this when I think diving into a bunch of research and history is unnecessary.