There is a strange punishment that comes with being good at solving problems: eventually, people stop bringing you problems and start giving you ownership of them. Regardless of where the problem came from.
When you’re starting out, this feels great. You become the person who can handle things. The boss trusts you. Coworkers call you when something goes sideways. You get access, responsibility and probably a little ego boost from being the one who can walk into a mess and walk out with a solution.
Then things shift.
You stop asking whether the problem is actually yours. And people begin to take you and your skills for granted.
I learned this in a fairly spectacular way when I rented a car in my own name for someone who had no business driving it. At the time, it didn’t feel like I was making some enormous ethical or professional decision. It felt like Tuesday. There was a problem. I was the problem solver. So I solved it.
A few hours later, I was sitting behind the locked doors of a police station while a detective looked at my driver’s license and asked why my name was on the rental agreement.
There is an age old adage: The ‘Curse of Competence’. I learned about that the hard way and in this case, it nearly ended in me getting criminal charges.
If you solve enough emergencies, you can start confusing capability with obligation. I can fix this becomes I should fix this. Then I should fix this becomes I’m responsible if this isn’t fixed. Even if I had nothing to do with creating the problem.
That progression is how good employees end up carrying risks that properly belong to the company, the boss, the client or the person who created the mess in the first place.
And there is another trap. When your improvised solutions keep working, you start believing the improvisation itself is smart. You forget how much luck was involved. We had escaped so many ridiculous situations that I started to think we were bulletproof. In reality, we had just been lucky enough not to hit the wall yet.
The useful question isn’t only, “Can I solve this?”
It’s, “What am I personally agreeing to own if I do?”
That might mean your name on a contract. It might mean promising a deadline you don’t control. It might mean covering for somebody repeatedly until their job quietly becomes yours. It might simply mean teaching everyone around you that whenever they create a disaster, you will absorb it.
Sometimes the most professional answer is not a clever solution. It’s a boring boundary.
In my case: “Take the limo or leave it.”
He would have been furious. I would have had an unpleasant ten minutes. Then everybody would have moved on.
Instead, I avoided ten minutes of conflict and bought myself an hour and a half wondering whether I was about to become an orange jumpsuit guy.
That was a terrible trade.
Being dependable is valuable. Being endlessly available for other people’s consequences is not the same thing.
The best fixers eventually learn one last skill: when to say NO.