The Problem You'd Rank as Your Biggest Isn't Necessarily the One Actually Running the Show — Ask What's Present In All Your Other Problems Too.
Asked to name their biggest problem, most people can answer quickly and with real confidence — usually whichever difficulty currently feels most urgent, most painful, or most consequential in the moment. Size, judged this way, is a reasonable-seeming but not necessarily accurate guide to which problem is actually doing the most structural work.
A genuinely central pattern often shows up not as the single biggest problem, but as a recurring thread present across several problems that look, on the surface, unrelated — a smaller presence in each individual problem, but a consistent one, doing quiet foundational work underneath multiple visible difficulties at once.
This is why addressing the "biggest" problem directly sometimes produces disappointing results: the biggest-looking problem may simply be the loudest current expression of a pattern that's also quietly running two or three other problems that weren't identified as connected, and resolving one expression leaves the underlying mechanism fully intact to produce the next one.
A more useful question than "what's my biggest problem" is "what's present in all my problems" — because the answer to the second question, unlike the first, tends to point at the actual mechanism doing the work, rather than just the problem currently making the most noise.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai