I need another weekly “sync” on my calendar like I need a bullet to the head.

Meeting culture has convinced most teams that being in communication is the same thing as making progress. It isn’t. Especially when half the meetings companies run exist to create the illusion that everyone is working instead of doing the work itself.

At any given moment there are specific constraints in a business that, if solved, would have a disproportionate impact on the health and growth of the company. Constraints that realistically should become the #1 priority — where energy, focus, and resources get allocated until the thing is solved.

The issue is that most people don’t naturally operate this way.

Unless you’ve trained yourself into it, almost nobody starts their workday asking:

“What is the biggest constraint in this business right now?”

And:

“What am I personally doing to help solve it?”

Operating through this lens requires people to starve oxygen to anything that isn’t the number one problem sitting in front of them. And when you ask people to do that, they squirm like ants under a magnifying glass.

I watch this every week across the businesses we work with.

The thing that should be top priority — the thing that would make a monumental difference if it got solved — stays unresolved for months while teams organize, discuss, document, brainstorm, and schedule twelve different syncs about it.

On the outside it looks like laziness when it’s usually avoidance.

Because solving real constraints requires people to sit in a very uncomfortable reality: 

You are trying to solve problems with skills, experience, and pattern recognition you do not yet have.

That threatens people’s sense of competence.

It forces them into situations where they might get it wrong in front of a room full of people who now get to witness exactly where their current capabilities end.

Most people will do almost anything to avoid sitting in that feeling for an extended period of time.

So instead they default to busy work that feels productive because it protects certainty. Anything except sitting still long enough to stare directly at the thing nobody knows how to solve yet.

As a leader or business owner, one of your primary responsibilities is teaching yourself how to run toward that discomfort instead of away from it. To develop the emotional capacity and problem solving ability required to identify and solve constraints quickly.

Constraints are just the truth of a business at any given moment.

And truth does not care how you feel about it.

It will still be sitting there whether you look at it or not.

In our company we call this process “fussy and fucked.” My cofounder coined it.

Learning something new is irritating. Slow. Nothing feels right at first. You second guess yourself constantly. And the constraint fights back before it breaks.

Then, after it’s stripped a few layers of skin off you, eventually something clicks.”

And suddenly the thing that felt impossible two months ago becomes standard operating procedure.

Most businesses don’t stay stuck because people are unintelligent.

They stay stuck because nobody wants to sit in the discomfort long enough to solve the thing that actually matters.

Ask yourself one question this week.

What is the one thing, if solved, that would make everything else easier?

Sit with it until you have an honest answer. Then put everything you have behind solving it