Every ability you have exists because something needed solving. Problem solving sits underneath the rest, connected to a lot of them: “you can think of it as the DNA of skill. Every skill solves a problem.”

It comes with a warning. “Problems don’t exist in isolation; they have other problems that support them.” Set out to fix one and the effort often exposes the others holding it up.

So the crucial move comes before the fixing: find the enablers and the connections, until you can see what is happening and why. Then the answer may not be the obvious problem at all. Solving a smaller, less obvious one sometimes clears the rest by domino effect.