Everyone Talks About Solutions. Almost No One Talks About the Problems.

The Uncomfortable Truth. Everyone talks about solutions. But not their real problems.

Everyone talks about solutions.

Frameworks.
Wins.
Lessons learned.
Clear thinking.
Clean narratives.
Tidy arcs that move from challenge to insight to growth.

And yet, in private conversations, in peer groups, masterminds, meetings, every founder, leader, and executive I speak to is carrying problems. Real problems. Complex ones. Unresolved ones. Problems without clean edges or easy answers.

I know I have more problems than solutions right now. And I can’t share any of them.

Not responsibly.
Not safely.
Not without consequences.

That’s the part we don’t really talk about.

Because there’s an unspoken rule in leadership, business, and public life:
you’re allowed to talk about a problem only after it’s been solved.
Only once it’s been reframed as insight.
Only once it’s no longer risky, legally sensitive, reputationally complex, or emotionally raw.

Anything else can make you look incompetent.
Or unstable.
Or like you don’t know what you’re doing.
Or worse, like a victim.

So instead, we talk about outcomes.
We talk about clarity.
We talk about what we’ve “learned.”

And that creates a distortion. A cognitive dissonance even.

It creates the impression that other people are calmer, more capable, more in control. That they have fewer problems, or better ones, or that they move through difficulty faster than you do.

But the truth; the one you only hear in quiet conversations; is that most people are standing in the middle of something unresolved.

They’re holding decisions that affect other people’s livelihoods.
They’re navigating legal, financial, ethical, or relational complexity.
They’re carrying responsibility that can’t be crowdsourced or processed publicly.
They’re doing the slow, careful work of not making things worse.

And they’re doing it quietly.

The cost of that silence is subtle, but real.

When no one talks about the unresolved, it becomes easy to believe you’re the only one struggling. That everyone else has it figured out and you somehow missed a step. That the fact you feel stretched, uncertain, or overwhelmed must mean you’re doing something wrong.

Even when you know, intellectually, that this isn’t true, emotionally, it still lands.

There’s also a strange pressure to turn everything into a lesson in real time. To package difficulty into something palatable, useful, inspiring. To say “here’s what I learned” even when the truth is: I’m still in it.

But not everything is ready to be a lesson.

Some things are still unfolding.
Some things involve other people’s privacy.
Some things require discretion, patience, and time.
Some things are simply too complex to explain without doing harm.

And yet, holding all of that internally, without language or acknowledgement, can feel deeply isolating.

This is the tension I’m sitting with.

I don’t think leaders need to overshare.
I don’t think every problem belongs online.
I don’t think vulnerability should be performative or compulsory.

But I do wonder what it costs us, individually and collectively, when there’s no space to say: this is hard, and I don’t have clarity yet.

Not as a confession.
Not as a collapse.
Not as a call for rescue.

Just as truth.

Because leadership isn’t actually about having fewer problems.
It’s about having the capacity to hold more of them, responsibly, quietly, without losing yourself in the process.

Right now, I’m still showing up.
Still building.
Still doing the work.
Still carrying things I can’t talk about.

And I don’t have a neat conclusion for this.

Only a question I keep returning to:

What would change if we made more room for the unresolved, not to fix it publicly, but to acknowledge that it exists?

Maybe the real work isn’t appearing solved.
Maybe it’s staying steady while things are still in motion.