Answers
Stop seeking comfort in other people's solutions.
Last updated
Stop seeking comfort in other people's solutions.
Last updated
Most people just want an answer. It doesn't matter if it's the right answer, nor does it have to be seen as an answer by everyone. As long as it's delivered with confidence and feels right to the target audience, that's often enough.
Even more importantly, people want answers from third-party, authoritative sources. When it comes to the most pressing issues a person faces, the answers they get from family, friends and other everyday people they interact with are often seen as insufficient. It's only when the answers come from an oracle, god(s), or some kind of mystic that they carried any real gravity.
This is an instinctual reaction to uncertainty. We fear the future, whether it looks bright or dim. But this need for answers also hurts us. When you decide to seek an answer from any external source, you are handing over the keys of your autonomy. This is a frictionless event in most cases, happening below the level of conscious awareness as people probe around for efficient explanations.
There are cases when losing that autonomy doesn't mean mean—such as looking up a fact on Wikipedia or Google. You aren't less of a free thinker because you couldn't remember the capital of Peru, or you needed an answer about how to solve a widely-understood programming problem.
Where you get into trouble is looking for firm, concrete answers when one doesn't exist. For example, if you're not sure if you want to have kids, the last thing you should do is ask anyone else whether it's a good idea. Every person has their own opinion about it, especially if they have children of their own already.
None of those opinions are wrong per se, as they reflect that particular person's perspective based on their own palette of experiences. But none of them apply to you, your brain, your environment, and so on. Their answers are just that: their answers, not yours.
This is a frightening proposition, as it implies you have no choice but to take risks. You may have a child and discover that you hate it. Or it may be the best thing that ever happened to you. Either way, nobody can tell you what that experience entails for you, since by default nobody knows. It doesn't matter how much experience anyone else has in that sort of arena either—that accumulation of data doesn't apply to you.
What's even more frustrating is the fact that answers have a maddening tendency to lead to more questions. You start with a single question, find what feels like an answer, and, without warning, you find yourself staring at a hydra of five new questions. Then you answer some of those questions, only to realize each answer has once again sprouted multiple new, unknown paths!
I often think of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail. This image encapsulates the reality of our most important problems. You keep trying to get to the bottom of it, only to discover an infinite loop. A big step in the right direction is acknowledging that the journey is the destination and embracing that search instead of running from it.
The answer is to stop thinking in terms of answers. Any answer you get, unless it's some basic fact along the lines of the capital of Peru or the answer to 2+2, is better viewed as an entry into new, more interesting questions. That process of question asking never ends—which, if you're the kind of person who found their way to this book, is the best part of this whole deal called being alive.
Solving problems in complex, unpredictable environments like the one you're living in right now follows the same dynamic. You know you need solutions, and it's easy to fall into the trap of seeking out the fastest possible answer from some kind of third-party authority. Recognize right now that this is a path to nowhere.
To get any kind of real answers, answers that apply to your specific situation, you must act. Contact with the world is mandatory. No amount of reading, thinking or navel gazing will help you in the quest for real knowledge, and I say that as someone who has burned far too much time doing all three.
One of the fundamental problem solving skills emerges out of all this: the ability to recognize where answers exist and where they don't. It's amazing how much progress you can make—and how many landmines you can avoid—when you recognize that a single, concrete answer isn't possible. Likewise, an answer may exist, but you need to be willing to admit that there's no way to find it without exploration.
Other people's solutions to your problems are not real solutions. You may be able to copy/steal pieces of other people's solutions—which is a practice I encourage. But even if all you do is solve via recombination of existing solutions, those mixtures must be adapted to your situation in unique ways.
At a more philosophical level, when you adopt someone else's solutions you are forfeiting the essence of who you are as a person. This is the definition of conformity: giving up your own ideas in the name of adopting safe, proven routes designed by others. What's so wicked about conformity is that it's a lie—it won't get you what you want, even if it does get you something. Conformity does pay well, after all.
If you're a leader and your goal is to find some cookie-cutter framework that will magically solve wicked problems on your behalf, you're deluding yourself—and you probably shouldn't be in a leadership position. At worst, you're setting yourself up to be a sucker for someone's scam. At best, you're missing the whole point of leadership, which is to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.
The truth, which many people find unbearable, is that you need to discover your own path. Guides like this exist to show you a variety of doors you can walk through, but it's up to you to make the real-world choice of walking through one or the other. As a leader, no matter how you define that, you need to internalize that as a core feature of your day-to-day life.
Look on the bright side: your life will be full of color. After all, if you aren't solving complex problems, chances are your life is pretty tame.
