Einstein’s Secret to Amazing Problem Solving (and 10 Specific Ways You Can Use It) Einstein is quoted as having said that if he had one hour to save the world he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. This quote does illustrate an important point: before jumping right into solving a problem, we should step back and invest time and effort to improve our understanding of it. Here are 10 strategies you can use to see problems from many different perspectives and master what is the most important step in problem solving: clearly defining the problem in the first place! The Problem Is To Know What the Problem Is The definition of the problem will be the focal point of all your problem-solving efforts. What most of us don’t realize — and what supposedly Einstein might have been alluding to — is that the quality of the solutions we come up with will be in direct proportion to the quality of the description of the problem we’re trying to solve. Problem Definition Tools and Strategies 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
3 Ways to Spot Logical Fallacies A fallacy is simply a false or mistaken idea. If you can spot logical flaws, you can save yourself from bad information. This includes defending yourself from politicians, sales people, diet books, doctors, and even your own kids. In logical arguments, where logic matters, it’s important to avoid your own logical fallacies, as well as spot them in counter-arguments. In rhetoric, your overall persuasion is more important than logic. While logic plays a role, it’s also about emotion and character (see Character Trumps Emotion Trumps Logic.) In Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion , Jay Heinrichs writes about detecting logical fallacies.Key Take AwaysHere’s my key take aways: Distinguish between rhetoric and logic. Once you know what to look for, spotting logic flaws is a lot easier. Why Spot Logical FallaciesWhy should you learn how to spot logical fallacies? Bad proofs. Bad ProofsThis includes three sins:
In The Quest For New Ideas, Can The Internet Replace Random Real-Life Discovery? What does Renaissance art have in common with a pencil? If you believe in knowledge through serendipitous discovery, then quite a lot. This week I was looking for a book on Renaissance art in the library. While walking through the stacks, Henry Petroski’s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, a book about the origins of the pencil, caught my eye. Rewind one week. As more and more book sales move online, brick and mortar bookstores are stocking only the most popular titles, reducing our chance of stumbling across that random, fascinating book that you never would have looked for. And it’s not just me. So if the likelihood of chance encounters through paper decreases, where else can these serendipitous encounters occur? Online Serendipity At first glance, the possibility of encountering random information online seems small. Our other online pursuit, searching for information online, usually starts with a search engine. Serendipity Tools Programming Serendipity? What’s Next?
How to Become an Expert: A Roadmap Wouldn’t you like to be an expert? To intuitively know the right answers? Enter the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, which shines a light on how we develop and master skills, helping us understand how we progress from novice to expert, including all the steps in between. Experts are Not Just Supercharged Novices There’s much more to mastering a skill than just acquiring more knowledge. Let’s take a familiar example: cooking. To understand how that works, let’s turn to the ideas developed by brothers Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus in the early 80s, the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. The 5 Skill Levels 1. The main goal of novices is to accomplish immediate tasks. To improve, novices usually need close monitoring to bring their actions as close as possible to achieve what is expected by adhering to the rules. 2. Advanced beginners still operate following rules, but they’re able to apply them not only on the exact situations that they were intended for, but also on similar contexts. 3. 4.
SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer) How To Think Like Bill Gates Over the years, I’ve asked various people at Microsoft about how Bill Gates thinks. I’ve asked people from his speech writers to people that have survived his executive reviews, where Bill is known for his grueling interrogations. I was always curious how somebody of that caliber flexed their mind and used their skills to slice and dice problems. Bill Gates sees and thinks differently than most people do. 10 Ways to Think Like Bill GatesWhile I don’t think Bill will lend you his brain, you can do the next best thing. Prioritize. If these thought patterns and practices don’t stand out as different or extraordinary, contrast them with some common default patterns: The good news is, thinking is a skill and there are plenty of resources that we can use to improve our thinking techniques. My Related Posts Photo by Domain Barnyard.
How To Find Startup Ideas – Wesley Tansey I recently have met a number of people who expressed how badly they wanted to do a startup but said they lacked any good ideas. I know that startup ideas are worthless, especially since I have lived through the dozens of iterations involved, first with EffectCheck and now with Curvio. Nevertheless, you need to start somewhere and that means you need an idea that sufficiently captivates you. Now, I could simply give these people a list of startup ideas, but for an idea to really stick in your mind enough that you’ll want to start a company around it, you need to come up with it yourself. I’ve come up with a brief collection of strategies that you can use to generate new ideas for startups: Repurpose Take a service or approach applied to one market, and apply it to another.Examples: Chill (Turntable.fm), Yammer (social networks for businesses) Digitize Take content or functionality that exists only in a legacy form and put it online or in an app.Examples: Dr. Automate Unify Componentize Connect
How to retain 90% of everything you learn Imagine if you had a bucket of water. And every time you attempted to fill the bucket, 90% of the water would leak out instantly. Every time, all you’d retain was a measly 10%. How many times would you keep filling the bucket? The answer is simple: just once. The first time you noticed the leak, you’d take action You’d either fix the bucket or you’d get another bucket, wouldn’t you? Yet that’s not at all the way we learn. That weird thing is that you’re wasting time. To summarize the numbers (which sometimes get cited differently) learners retain approximately: 90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately. 75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned. 50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion. 30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration. 20% of what they learn from audio-visual. 10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading. 5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture. 5000bc now has a Waiting List.