Epiphany: Stop focusing on solutions.
I had a minor revelation today. It hasn’t quite sunk in but I am working on making it do so.
Life has been less than stellar recently. I stopped school in order to set up a small buisness helping people with computers which hasn’t been going too well. I bought a CISS in order to print leaflets and messed up twice as it didn’t come with a manual. The amount of time I have spent trying to get it working has tolled on me so much that today I emailed the people and said I was just going to give up and print the leaflets on my mum’s laser printer in black and white. Suddenly I could solve the problem again, I began planning how I could market the black and white leaflets as being part of an “Introductory offer” which also solves my problem of not yet knowing how much people are willing to pay for computer help (I’ve got the price down to between £35 – £65).
When I made this decision to give up on one solution and look for the easiest way I felt like I had been trying to climb a wall and for ages and then given up and walked around it. In truth, I had just been making much more of a problem for myself than was really there; Focusing less on the problem and more on the solution.
“Focus on the problem and the solution will come,
focus only on the solution and you will get nothing but problems.”
The Change:
I need to make the shift from the thought process of:
I need to do solve abc,
To do so I need to do xyz,
I can’t do xyz, therefore I cant solve the problem
to:
I need to solve problem abc,
What can I do to solve problem abc?
def, ghi or jkl. I can ‘t do def or jkl but I can do ghi.
Do ghi, done! Problem abc solved.
I’ve heard of this idea being called “brute forcing problems” which I will try and do more often when one solution to any given problem fails.
