At some point I noticed that most of the urgent things in my day were not actually my problems to solve.
Not because they were unimportant. Because someone else — usually someone capable — had quietly decided I was the right person to route them to.
How it happens
It starts with being helpful.
You solve something well. You do it faster than expected, or better than expected, or both. The person you helped remembers. Next time they hit something similar, they think of you.
You help again. Same thing happens.
This is a good loop. This is how trust gets built. Nothing has gone wrong yet.
The problem is that the loop doesn’t naturally stop. Every problem you solve adds another node to the network of people who think of you first. You get better at solving things. More things get routed to you. Your calendar fills with problems that are adjacent to your actual work but not quite your work.
And because you’re competent, most of them get handled. Which confirms to everyone — including you — that this is the right allocation of your time.
What you’re actually doing
There’s a useful distinction between your problems and problems you’re capable of solving.
Competent people often can’t tell these apart in the moment. A problem arrives. It looks solvable. You solve it. But “I can solve this” is not the same as “I should be the one to solve this.”
What you’re really doing when you consistently solve other people’s problems: you’re training them to route those problems to you.
You’re also training yourself to accept the incoming queue as the default unit of your work.
Neither of those is a deliberate choice. They just happen — as a side effect of being good at things.
The load-bearing problem
Here’s where it gets structurally interesting.
The more you absorb, the more load-bearing you become. Not just in terms of workload — in terms of how the people around you actually operate. Other people stop solving certain problems because you solve them. Systems that should be built aren’t built because you’re a faster short-term solution than an actual solution.
This is invisible until you try to step back.
You take a week off. Someone tries to cover and discovers there are things that only you know how to handle. Or you try to reduce your involvement in a process and realize there’s no one with the context to take it on cleanly.
You didn’t mean to become a single point of failure. You just kept being helpful.
The uncomfortable inversion
The thing I had to reckon with: some of what I was doing wasn’t leadership. It was something closer to the opposite.
Solving other people’s problems directly creates dependency. It’s efficient in the short term. But each time you do it, you’re making a small bet that your availability is more valuable than their growth.
That bet gets more expensive the more often you make it.
The inversion is this: the most useful thing is sometimes to not solve the problem — and instead create the conditions where someone else develops the capacity to solve it. That’s slower. It’s often more frustrating. But it scales in a way that the other approach doesn’t.
What I actually did
I’m not going to pretend I had a clean insight and then changed my behavior cleanly. That’s not how it worked.
What happened was more gradual. I started asking, when something arrived: why is this coming to me? Not “why is this a problem?” — that question leads you straight into solving mode. Just: why here, why now, why me?
That question slowed down the reflex. Sometimes the answer was genuinely “because I’m the right person and it’s a good use of my time.” But often the answer was “because I solved something like this once, and now it routes to me automatically.”
That second answer is useful. Because once you can see the routing, you can start asking whether the routing makes sense.
The actual shift
It wasn’t about refusing to help. It was about changing what “helping” meant.
The old version: solve the problem. The new version: solve it in a way that creates less dependency, not more.
Sometimes that means solving it alongside someone instead of for them. Sometimes it means asking the person to bring a proposed solution first, and then talking through it. Sometimes it means not responding at once, and watching whether it resolves without you.
None of this is dramatic. But it changes the aggregate slowly.
The routing doesn’t disappear overnight. The load-bearing role doesn’t transfer cleanly or quickly. But you stop adding to it — and that’s where it starts.