Mistaking the symptom for the problem is something we all do.
Recently, I wrote about my personal spending getting away from me because I wasn’t setting aside time to “Observe My Money”.
Once the problem surfaced, I deep-dived (dove?) into where it was all going and discovered an obnoxious amount of money being spent on dinners out.
Interesting. The symptom is spending too much. The problem is eating out too much.
But that’s not the ROOT problem.
It didn’t dawn on me until I was talking about it with my wife this weekend, trying to figure out alternatives to eating out, and then it dawned on me…
The ROOT problem was being bored with our at-home dinners.
We both work hard and don’t want to put too much effort into dinner when we get home.
So our dinners trend towards one-pot meals with some form of ground meat.
We found some we liked and neither of us really needs variety in our meals, so we’ve cooked the same 5 or 6 dinners for the last 12 months.
It was fine…until it wasn’t.
What we realized was that eating out was actually avoidance behavior because we were sick of our dinners.
Ah ha!
So this weekend, we dug up some equally simple, but tasty dinners to cook, which we’re trying out this week.
We’ve got 5 dinners at home planned out this week with groceries already purchased.
Until we find the ROOT problem (which is never the first thing you see), it’s very difficult to produce the right solution.
The solution won’t always be as easy as finding new recipes and buying groceries, but until we’re solving for the ROOT problem and not the symptom, we’ll never get on the right track.
