Internal problems versus external problems
Know what you are solving for
About 11 years ago I came to the realisation I was experiencing anxiety on an almost daily basis and had been for many years. Although I found this quite manageable and had just been getting on with my life regardless, it occurred to me that this frequency might not be normal. So in order to get some perspective I began asking friends whether they experienced much anxiety, and at roughly what frequency. From my anecdotal and fairly unscientific data, I deduced that there was definitely a wide variance1 - some people also reported daily feelings of anxiety, but others far less and seemed to live life mostly untroubled by anxiety.
I also realised that these regular feelings of anxiety were affecting my entrepreneurial activities - my day to day work was influenced by a desire not to feel anxiety, either by overcoming it (e.g. spending a lot of time on public speaking) or avoiding it (e.g. massive procrastination).
This is an example of what I’d call an “internal problem” - whether consciously or unconsciously, I’m trying to solve an internal feeling. I have written about anxiety before, but some other examples that might conjure up internal problems would be self esteem, being overly extroverted/introverted and being obsessive.
Entrepreneurship is choosing which problems to solve
As an entrepreneur, I’m used to solving problems. I think you could fairly accurately describe entrepreneurship as 20% ideas and 80% problem solving. And as a further refinement, I would suggest successful entrepreneurship is largely about choosing the right problems to solve (the lazy entrepreneur would certainly agree).
One key point about entrepreneurship is that there’s no boss, no-one is telling you what to do - you take all the responsibility on making the decisions. This makes it extra hard, because you have more choice - if you’re not paying attention to or ignoring what is going on “internally” you may not be making the best choices for your business.
Of course I’m not saying solving internal problems is wrong, far from it - overcoming some long term internal issue can be truly life changing and really help you with your business. But you still want to have perspective and parse apart the internal problems from the external, so you can be objective about which problems you choose to solve.
And a quick google search reveals there’s plenty of research on this, suffice to say there’s undoubtably a wide variance in the base line of anxiety different people feel.