Buckets — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

Most problems are one big complicated mess. It's hard for people to get their arms around them and know how to start. "I'm not happy at work." or "My life is crazy and I feel out of control." Stated that way, a problem is paralyzing — it's too big to grab onto, so it creates tremendous stress. The same is true for big business problems. "Should we open retail stores?" or "Would that company be a good acquisition target for us?"

Here's what I've learned to do, and it's the single most useful thing I bring to the people I advise: take that big problem and break it into different buckets. I learned this from one of the best problem-solvers I ever met — Bob Napor, my boss at AT&T, a former BCG consultant who taught my mind to think this way. Almost any overwhelming problem, when you look closely, is really just a handful of separate things.

"I'm not happy at work" isn't one problem — it's four: impact, enjoyment, compensation, and flexibility. "My life is out of control" isn't one mess — it's six buckets of time competing for your 168 hours. And "Should we open retail stores?" isn't one question either — it's real estate economics, brand, channel conflict, and operations. The two free frameworks I built into KeyLearnings.ai are really just this skill applied to two specific problems. But it works on everything. Almost anything that feels huge is actually three, or four, or six concrete things.

And that changes everything. It breaks the problem down into bite-sized pieces. You go from "I don't know what to do" to "okay, it's really just three things."

The best part: this isn't a talent you're born with. It's a skill, and you can get better at it. Next time something feels overwhelming, don't try to solve the whole thing. Just ask: what are the actual pieces here? Name them. You'll be amazed how often "this is impossible" turns into "oh — it's just these three or four things." Most people can't do this — so if you can, it becomes a superpower.