There’s a lot of problems that feel unsolvable. I don’t mean unsolvable problems like “Why does God allow suffering” or “What’s the meaning of life”.
I mean problems you feel like you can’t solve, even when others have solved them, you know others have solved them and you know your brain isn’t physically incapable of solving them.
Unless you pay attention to your thoughts and emotions, you might never think about it. But once you do, the feeling is there. The best I can describe it is separation.
It feels like your reality is separate from that thing you know exists. But your little sliver of reality doesn’t have access. The video game map ends there, and you can hit the sprint button as much as you want.
For a long time, I felt like this about happiness. It might be a silly example, but whenever I saw a group of college students picnicking in the park, they seemed to be so absorbed by just being happy with their friends. Not worried about money or work or if the baguette they’re eating is whole-grain.
I always walked past, knowing I probably make more money, am fitter and live in a bigger apartment. But that happiness always seemed inaccessible.
But you know what I’d never done? Planned a picnic. I zipped past them at the park, miserable from feeling like I’d never experience the peace and happiness they did.
And I’d never asked a single person to plan a picnic with me.
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When direct reports complain to Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, he loves to ask “Have you tried solving the problem?”.
He says this management technique pre-empts many problems. Too often, his team members approached him with problems they had done nothing to fix—not even the most obvious, lowest-effort thing. They’re coming to him because they believe he can save them. They can hand him their problems and make them disappear.
Aren’t we all like that with so many things?
- I currently don’t like the clothes I have. I haven’t gone shopping for new ones.
- At work, we struggled with getting blog readers, but had never posted about our articles on social media.
- In relationships, how often do we second-guess ourselves instead of having the conversation?
Self-help books, blogs and social media people are obsessed with finding a new, different way to solve the problem.
We want there to be a method, a person, a something that we can just hand our problems and find them solved. But we are that person.
We just need to do the most obvious thing. We don’t need a special diet, we know veggies are healthy and donuts aren’t. The problem is that the most obvious thing is often painful.
Telling your partner what bothers you is obvious, but painful. So is watching your friends eat the dessert you also wanted to order. So is taking on the extra work you know needs to be done, but don’t want to do.
You’re not separate from a world in which your problems are solved. You just don’t like the obvious next step.
That book you’ve been telling yourself you’d write? You don’t have writer’s block. You just don’t like that it means getting up an hour earlier to write. The business you’ve been meaning to start? It’s not “the wrong time”, you just hate that it means working nights and weekends.
You usually know what you need to do. You just don’t like what it is.