Come with solutions, not problems
I worked at a pretty intense AI startup a few months ago, and although I hated roughly 83% of it, I still learnt a bunch of valuable lessons.
One of those lessons was about problems and solutions.
The founder and I would sit down every week to talk about my progress. In one of those weeks, sales had been much tougher than usual, and the numbers reflected that.
I told her the situation, and what she said next left me dumbfounded. She look at me with a deadpan stare and said, "OK. What solutions have you come up with to fix this?"
"Uhh, I don't, uhh, really know, uhh" was my answer because I had no f-ing idea and didn't think that far ahead. I felt dumb, unprepared, and like I was wasting both of our time.
That question taught me a really important lesson (well 2 lessons actually):
- Don't expect anyone to solve your problems
- Come to people with SOLUTIONS, not just the problem. Doing just the latter is extremely unproductive and lazy.