The Problem is Not the Problem

Or, it’s all about how you think about the problem

👋 Hey, Abhishek here! Welcome to The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I tackle fundamental questions about decision making, clear thinking, and anything else that’s stressing you out in the business of life. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing.

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Q: What is the best way to approach a problem?

Today, let’s talk about problems. More precisely, how to approach problems. Over the years I’ve come to realise that we waste our time worrying about specific problems — how to deliver a project, how to get funding, how to crack an interview — whereas the real problem is we don’t know how to think about the problem correctly.

As a kid I struggled with chemistry whereas my physics was top notch. I was one of the few in class who could grasp physics concepts rather easily. I was pretty proud of myself. But later I realised I wasn’t unique in anyway. It had nothing to do with who I was and everything to do with knowing the fundamentals of physics very well. I understood physics naturally because it had rational (and almost unbreakable) laws whereas chemistry was full of exceptions.

I knew the correct way to approach physics problems — learning a handful of concepts helped me solve almost all problems — whereas I had no idea how to attack chemistry problems. I put more time in physics since I enjoyed it and more or less ignored chemistry, while other classmates loved memorising the exceptions in chemistry. Chemistry didn’t scare them because they knew how to think about them correctly.

But the same framework (that solves chemistry problems) cannot solve physics problems and vice versa. So physics and chemistry weren’t the real problems, how each of us thought about them was the real problem (as well as the solution).

Now, there are innumerable problems in life and we can never prepare ourselves ahead of time for all of them. Therefore specialisation in particular kind of problems isn’t scalable.

Real education is not learning what to think about, but how to think in general. In other words, real education is not in kicking ass in physics and being dumb in chemistry. Real education is learning enough frameworks to attack physics and chemistry problems, and then some more.

The first step to solving any problem is to figure out its mechanics. Without the common laws, we cannot solve any of the physics problems. Without a fair understanding of elements, bonds and their exceptions, chemistry would baffle us.

A good strategy is to be a person who knows a little bit about a lot of things and constantly draws analogies and lessons from them. These lessons become general frameworks that help us solve specific problems. This, however, may not be as effective at school, but it’s indispensable in real life.

For example, Johannes Kepler drew analogies from planets imbued with souls riding on interlocking crystalline spheres, from boatmen steering in a whirling river, from giant magnetic bodies pulling and pushing each other — before concluding that celestial bodies pull one another and larger bodies have more pull. He didn’t have Newton’s laws at hand (Isaac Newton was born more than a decade after Kepler’s death), but he knew a little bit about a lot of things to attack unknown problems. If you didn’t realise it already, Kepler was solving a physics problem.

The more we experience new things the more we learn, and the more capable we become in seeing the world with varied lenses, thinking about problems from multiple angles, and considering possibilities that were previously inconceivable.

On the contrary, when we do not do the work of learning how to think, we become stuck in the face of a new problem, make the same mistakes we made countless times, and remain under the mercy of the situation rather than taking control of it.

In conclusion, a problem is not the real problem. The real problem is either a fallacy in our knowing, our understanding, our focus, or our perception. If we don’t consciously focus on learning more about how the world works, we’ll waste a lot of time reacting to things without knowledge. This isn’t the smartest way to live.

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Interesting Finds

Short documentary about a trio of foley artists and how movie sounds are made. With advances in technology, filming techniques have evolved over the years, but foley (sounds recreated for a film) still relies on traditional craftsmanship. Footsteps (this documentary) introduces its audience to three foley artists as we gain insight into their profession and enjoy their infectious passion and entertaining sense of humour. (Jeremy Benning / YouTube)

Naomi Osaka is destigmatising mental health in sports. In recent years, professional athletes like Michael Phelps have helped destigmatise conversations surrounding mental health, having shared their struggles with the public and defying typical sports conventions to show no signs of vulnerability, to just power through. (Sean Gregory / TIME)

Why is fan art so delightful? Not every fan makes fan art. But for folks who have an intense engagement with a fandom, tend to get inspired by it, and want to interact with it in a different way. They want to somehow make themselves part of the world that they have become engaged with. (Elisa Shoenberger / WIRED)

When you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. “For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” That’s what beloved writer Grace Paley addresses with extraordinary humour and intellectual elegance in a 1989 piece titled Upstaging Time. (Maria Popova / Brain Pickings)

The Soviet Union is gone, but it’s still collapsing. 25 years later, events didn’t exactly unfold as initially predicted. The forces of globalisation have mutated former Soviet countries in unseen ways, emboldening autocrats and entrenching corruption across the region. (FP Contributors / Foreign Policy)

Psychologists have long debated how flexible someone’s “true” self is. Can personality be changed? Many people fail in reaching their personal-development goals because they have unrealistic expectations about the speed, amount, ease, and consequences of attempts at self-change — a phenomenon they call false hope syndrome. (Scott Barry Kaufman / The Atlantic)

Happy is a relative state. “All this give and take, but I’ve found an uneasy peace. I’ve given you a version of my story, the best I have to give. I crafted it with words I chose and plucked so carefully, shaped through revision. I’ve given you this tale and you will decide what to make of it, what to make of me.” (Renée K. Nicholson / Longreads)

Why having friends of different ages matters. Varying ages have different life perspectives and experiences which can expose you to new ways of thinking and doing. If you’re a mother with a young baby, you don’t want to spend all your time with mothers with young babies. (Elizabeth Bennett / Sunday Edit)

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Timeless Wisdom

Disagreeableness is an underappreciated skill. Disagreeableness is important for good leadership and decision-making.

Being disagreeable isn’t the same as being rude. Being disagreeable isn’t the opposite of empathy. It’s possible to be nice and empathetic and still disagree.

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Quote to Note

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

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Before You Go…

Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋