![]() I remember one clue: “Gegs.” That was the whole clue. For instance, I love crosswords, and British crosswords are even trickier than American crosswords. They embrace the eraser and delete key.Īlmost every puzzle I tackled required this. They keep their beliefs provisional, open to new evidence. Good puzzlers don’t fall in love with their hypotheses. Perhaps the most powerful weapon a puzzler has is cognitive flexibility. It has spawned everything from the assembly line (what if the car parts move to workers, instead of workers moving to the car parts?) to the brilliant upside-down Heinz ketchup bottle. Reversing your thinking is an incredibly powerful tool not just in puzzles, but also in life and business. He will climb the hill and exit through the skylight. “Reversing your thinking is an incredibly powerful tool not just in puzzles, but also in life and business.”Īs solvers, many of us focus on the man digging a hole, but he is also doing the opposite: he is building a hill out of dirt. ![]() He knows it’s impossible to tunnel out, but continues to dig anyway. ![]() The only openings are a locked door and a skylight. The walls are cement and the floor is dirt. Or any other way.Ĭonsider the following puzzle. Eventually, I’m walking and realize, this isn’t so bad. And just step onto the rubber belt for just five minutes. Then the subgoal of turning the treadmill on. First, I tackle the subgoal of putting on my sneakers. ![]() If I say to myself, “You have to walk on the treadmill for an hour today,” I will delay this task forever. Or, take the puzzle of getting myself to walk the treadmill for a few minutes a day. Instead, I break it down into a series of chapters, and see it as a sequence of smaller puzzles. If I visualize my task as one monolithic book, I feel overwhelmed. I use it when facing the puzzle of writing my books. As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?” You won’t guess it exactly, but you’re more likely to be in the ballpark.īreaking a problem down into parts can work in all sorts of areas. If you take a wild, off-the-cuff guess, you’ll probably be wrong by orders of magnitude. David Epstein talks about how to solve Fermi problems in his book Range. “Breaking a problem down into parts can work in all sorts of areas.”Ī typical Fermi Problem goes like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” You have to estimate the size of something about which you are totally ignorant. Consider the genre of puzzles called Fermi Problems, a type of logic problem that Google and Microsoft famously ask at some job interviews. One of the best strategies for any puzzle is chopping the big puzzle into a series of smaller puzzles. What do we really disagree on? Why do I believe what I believe? Is there any evidence that could change one of our minds? Is there common ground? All of these are puzzles and pursuing their answers is a more likely way to produce a productive solution. Puzzles are solvable, motivating, and engage your creative and playful side.įor instance, if I’m talking to someone who disagrees with me-about business strategy, politics, or whatever-I could try berating them into changing their mind. When I look at life and business as a series of puzzles instead of problems, I’m both more productive and happier, because problems are fear-inducing and intractable. I want a tattoo of it on my forehead because it’s the perfect encapsulation of the Puzzler Mindset. The legendary music producer Quincy Jones has a saying: “I don’t have problems. This is a mindset of deep curiosity and reframing life’s problems and annoyances as puzzles. Instead, I recommend the Puzzler Mindset. But anger is counterproductive to creative solutions-you get tunnel vision. When confronting a problem, it’s easy to get angry and frustrated. shares 5 key insights from his new book, The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life. As a journalist and author, he is known for putting himself in the role of test subject as he embarks on various lifestyle investigations.īelow, A.J.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |