I don’t usually think of myself as a very clear-headed person… until people come to me with their problems 😂
I notice that people consistently overcomplicate their problems, quite dramatically. Problems become much easier to solve when you reduce them to their core elements.
Some general principles:
- nothing exists in isolation
- everything is made up of other things
- within a given context, some things are more important than other things
- simple language is incredibly clarifying
there two possible reasons why you’re not doing something, sometimes it’s both - you can’t (you don’t have the ability)
- you won’t (you don’t have the inclination)
if you’re not addressing these, you’re wasting your time.
“visa im stuck pls help”
if you’re stuck it’s because you’re not moving. where do you want to go? if you don’t know where you want to go, nobody can get you unstuck, because there’s nowhere you want to go
“I just want to be unstuck”
that’s almost never enough sadly
“There’s a million places I wanna go”
That’s too many, it’s functionally the same as not wanting to go anywhere at all
“But how can I pick just one”
By realizing that 1 is better than 0, and also a precursor to 2. You have to be able to lift the bar before you can add weights
“Ok I want to make the world a better place”
Awesome, how?
“Idk there are so many ways.”
Again this is why you’re “stuck”. If you don’t make decisions about where you’re trying to go, then you’re never going to get there
“Ok tbh I want to solve really big problems like cancer or homelessness or space travel but I am just some small baby, how do I even help with those when I can’t take care of myself”
There are ways! You’re not gonna be CEO of SpaceX tomorrow but you can set yourself On The Path. You can make big dents in big problems without necessarily being a cancer researcher or a rocket scientist. You can help more people learn about those problems. Do you really care about those problems? What are the best books to read, movies to watch? Why should I care too?
“Ok you know what I think those big things are just me having escapist fantasies… really I just wanna escape my boring job”
The universe does not award escapes to people who are bored. If you really want to escape you have to have articulate a compelling vision for yourself
“But I don’t know how to articulate a compelling vision for myself”
Ok, then learn! Investigate your own past history and behavior. What are some instances in your life where you set out to do something, and then did it? How did that play out? Why?
Zooming out, what sticks with me is how often kids with under-developed project management skills think that this somehow means that they are “lazy” or “unmotivated” etc.
It’s like trying to read too-small text and then thinking you’re a bad student when your eyes hurt
✱
Strange and funny first-principles-y conversation with wife: if you wanna fix problems, you need to have some kind of model in your mind for how problems get fixed. I think I mostly take for granted that I have this in my “operating system” and rarely think about it explicitly.
There are many ways to think about problems, I think my general thing is… you experience some kind of frustration, you try and guess what the source of the frustration is, and things can go in many directions from there, many ways of addressing, resolving, mitigating…
sometimes it can be that the experience of frustration is itself something that can be resolved; maybe there’s something wrong with your sensors, or with the way you process the information coming through your sensors – beliefs, assumptions. Or maybe it’s something outside of you
Sometimes it’s something that can be easily addressed by moving something around, like maybe your windows are dirty and you need to clean your windows. Easy. Maybe your energy levels are low- that’s more complicated, you have to investigate, develop a theory, test a hypothesis
often when you dig into any significant problem deeply enough you’ll find that it’s connected to lots of things – with energy levels it could be your diet, which could be affected by being a picky eater, and you might have some childhood issues to resolve there.
Personal things are often intertwined with social things- maybe your childhood issues had to do with school, and/or your peer group, which may be influenced by broader cultural things. Here you have to be careful to be clear about what’s helpful to address your initial frustration.
A common trap people seem to fall into is they conflate all the problems, which can compound their frustration into something unmanageable. Personal frustrations with daily life situations get intertwined with large scale societal problems that may not be resolved in our lifetime.
In my experience it’s important for people to feel like they have some amount of influence over their lives. This is largely a framing and project management problem. It’s about what you choose to focus on, how you define success and meaning.
A lot of people exert a tremendous amount of energy trying to solve a problem within some frame that isn’t actually addressing their frustration. Escapism, workaholism, etc. It’s always a good idea to periodically sit down and ask yourself what you’re doing + why you’re doing it.
There’s a spectrum of possible relationships you could have with problems themselves. Some find problems to be scary, overwhelming, frustrating, painful, tedious. Others find them to be interesting, challenging, compelling. You can move the slider on this. It’s about framing.
loosely, if you’re frustrated/overwhelmed by life, it’s often helpful to catalog your problems and look for a manageable one to solve. If you’re bored, it’s worth trying to find something ambitious & challenging to do that will stretch you. Solving problems in flow state is 
.
You might not be able to end racism or sexism or climate change anytime soon. But you can mentor young people. You can fight for more and better representation. You can help raise awareness about large and wicked problems, which is part of making them more solvable.
When thinking/worrying about large scale problems, you should to appreciate that large problems require a lot of coordination from a lot of people to solve. So if you’re serious about contributing, it helps to think about how other people can use, share & interface with your work.
Oh- one of the most simple and powerful ways to navigate the problems of life is to realize that you are very unlikely to be the first person to have a problem. We can always learn from our predecessors who had similar problems. Covid is not our first pandemic, for eg.
Generally speaking I think a lot of people are conditioned to think that they have to deal with their problems privately and in isolation. you don’t! you don’t necessarily have to be all public about it, but you can seek out trusted peers to work through things with together.
A concept my ex-boss introduced to me that I like is the “desired end-state”. Simply, what is the outcome that you want? What specifically has to happen in material reality that will satisfy you? (Once you write this down you can interrogate and analyze this productively).
“I will be satisfied when I have $1M in the bank” – okay sure- tho why exactly? What does the money do? What do you want to buy, or have the option of buying? What are the emotional realities you seek? Security? Prestige? It’s worth being honest and precise with yourself about this.
“I will be satisfied when I get a gf” – sure but why? What are the assumptions you have about what it means to have a partner? What does it mean for you narratively? Are your friends/family involved in this thinking? It’s normal to want companionship- it’s also cool to introspect.
The better you understand your motivations & frustrations, the better positioned you will be to make good decisions that address your problems- elegantly, creatively.
This works with other people too! The better I’ve gotten at it, the more people seem to wanna associate with me.
broadly speaking, it’s lucrative at many levels to be a person who develops a reputation for being good at dealing with problems and solving them well. This is obvious to me, but I’ve since learned it’s not obvious to everyone. People will bring you their problems: opportunities.
✱
I woke up this morning and got a flash of insight that I want to try and bottle in this blogpost.
Some background context – I’ve been working on my book INTROSPECT for a few years now, which is superficially about helping people solve problems, and at a meta level, a vehicle for me to examine my own problem-solving apparatus, system, style, disposition, track record, all of it. I’ve made lots of progress, done multiple rewrites over and over again, and I’ve felt for a few months that I’m “close to completion”, and yet not quite there. There’ been something missing from the book. I suspect that this morning’s insight might be it. I can’t be 100% certain until I weave it into the book, but I’m going to write this now either way just in case. It’ll be useful to me even if it turns out that I was wrong.
Right. So, I was having trouble sleeping last night… and to get meta about that, I’m convinced that my long-standing issue with sleep and rest is “the dragon” that I personally need to slay, the tightest bottleneck, the most annoying constraint that is currently limiting me from living my best life. I just wrote a blogpost about that a couple of days ago, revisiting dozens of posts I’ve written over the past decade where I try to make sense of my history with this particular problem.
I’ve found myself thinking, well, this is elegant! The real test of my book, INTROSPECT, is whether it can help me make progress in solving my own problem with sleep. If it can, it’s legit, it works, it’s worth sharing with others. If it can’t, it’s probably still worth sharing, but I’m not quite satisfied with it. I don’t quite feel like I can put my name and weight behind it with conviction. (Several friends have told me that this is a bit too high a bar, and I see the truth in what they’re saying, but also I want to be a little precious and self-indulgent about this.)
Well, so last night I was having trouble sleeping, and I was bored of my timeline on Twitter, so I asked people to share random things with me. There was a bunch of interesting stuff to read, and I fell asleep. When I woke up this morning, I saw that someone shared with me a blogpost by Dan Luu titled 95%-ile isn’t that good. The ideas in it are pretty straightforward and familiar, but somehow it hit me at the right time in the right way: “it’s unfortunate that so many players don’t realize that watching their own recordings or posting recordings for feedback could have saved 1198 hours of frustration.”
This triggered a euphoric cascade of ideas in me, as follows. It might not be perfect but the resonance is just really intense for me right now:
All learning is a matter of (1) defining problems, (2) soliciting feedback, and (3) integrating it.
There’s a ton of material you can read about each of these things. Einstein famously said, allegedly, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” There’s a similar idea described as “The Feynman Algorithm” – the humorously simplified version of it being “Write down the problem. Think real hard. Write down the solution.” The humor here is that there’s a lot that goes into “think real hard” – you can spend a lifetime developing all sorts of thinking tools, skills, tactics, perspectives that can come in handy when facing all manner of problems.
Anyway, here’s where I’m at. If I’m stuck on a problem, it likely means that (1) I haven’t defined it clearly enough. If I have defined it clearly enough, then it likely means that (2) I haven’t collected the right data, solicited the right feedback (whether from others or myself, or via experiment). If I have gotten the right feedback, and I’m still stuck, it means (3) I haven’t integrated the feedback into an attempted solution.
Now there are many things that can go wrong at each stage, but again, dealing with error is simply another problem to be solved. Someone on Twitter gave an example that’s like, “well ok, what if someone gives you feedback that you need to do X, but that doesn’t make any sense to you?” Then now you have a new sub-problem of figuring out what X means, and the entire process applies again. As you develop experience solving problems of varying kinds in multiple domains, you develop your intuition, which guides your decision-making through the problem-solving process.
Having written all of this, I’m not so sure I’ve done a good job of capturing the sheer aesthetic force of the insight I originally had. It was just staggering to me first thing in the morning how simple this all really is. Andy Grove had a riff about how, if someone isn’t doing their job, it’s because they’re unwilling and/or unable. Meaning they lack motivation and/or they lack skill. So you have to motivate and/or train them. That’s all there is to it! Just two things. Motivation and training. There’s something magnificent about the simplicity of that. Sure, it gets complicated within that, and you may find that trying to solve for one or both of those things requires getting into tremendous amounts of detail that you hadn’t expected, but if you’re using that to guide you, it’s all relevant. You just need to focus on the bottlenecks. What’s stopping this problem from being solved? Have I defined it correctly? How do I know that progress is being made? How do I implement the solution?
It should be helpful to think and talk about some examples. Music. Fitness. Writing. Cooking. Language acquisition. Audience-building. In every single one of those domains, the leading question, the overarching problem to be defined is, “what am I trying to do here?” Because if you don’t know what you’re trying to do, you’re extremely unlikely to end up doing it, especially if it involves any amount of complexity.
So it helps to have specific targets. SMART goals, some call them. I have to google that acronym… “specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely”. Seems like “achievable” and “realistic” are kind of the same thing. “Specific” and “measurable” are also quite intertwined. “Specific” and “timely” or “time-bound” are also kind of the same thing. Heh, it’s kind of a silly acronym, but it’s certainly sticky, probably because it implies that if you’re not setting SMART goals then you’re setting dumb ones. I would argue that dumb goals aren’t necessarily bad things because you can learn from them too if you’re mindful and paying attention.
Anyway. Let’s talk examples.
Guitar
For many years I was stuck in a rut with my guitar playing. I could play basically all of the straightforward traditional chords – all the “open” chords (A, Am, C, G, D, Dm, E, Em, F…) I could play barre chords (Bm, F#m, G#m, C#m), I had a rudimentary understanding of the major and minor scales (turns out they overlap, ie they’re kind of the same thing!). This is enough knowledge to basically learn to play most pop songs. I even learned about 7th chords – major 7ths, minor 7ths. I learned some things by learning songs, eg Maroon 5’s Sunday Morning is Dm7, G7, C. I learned some weird things by learning more difficult songs – Exit Music by Radiohead was a complicated and confusing one, I’m not sure if I perfectly remember how to play it. But it got me playing Asus2, Asus4, and weirder chords like Dadd9/F# and Gmadd11 – which I kind of learned to think about in a “relational” way. Sort of. I won’t claim to understand it, but I could play it.
Still, despite all of that, I still felt somewhat trapped within the domain of what I knew. I know that major and minor chords are made up of the root, third and fifth notes in the major and minor scale respectively, and that major and minor 7ths just add the 7ths of those notes. Sometimes you can play the 2nd or 4th and add a little flavor, that’s what Asus2. I just googled and learned that it’s called “suspended” because the 3rd is left out. Right, that makes sense. There’s stuff I know “in my hands” that I don’t really know “in my head”.
There were a couple of big breakthroughs for me in the past year or two, which I credit to Victor Wooten and Guthrie Govan. Wooten demonstrated that there are no “wrong notes” in music, that any note can work anywhere if you contextualize it correctly. And he advocates for practicing the chromatic scale (literally playing every single note in succession) to train your ear to hear precisely how each note sounds and feels. And he also points out (something that Miles Davis also pointed out), that if you have a note that feels “wrong”, you’ll find that on either side of that note is a note that feels right. Which means you can correct your mistakes at any time. “It’s so easy, but we make it hard.”
Guthrie taught me a couple of cool things. One, he demonstrated how every note in a scale has a particular feeling. The root feels like home, the third feels “musical” or “melodic”, it’s evocative, the fifth also feels quite homey, and the fourth, interestingly, feels like a “pause”, like a comma, punctuation, like, “go on…” – you’re not finished, there’s a tension there, it wants to resolve back home on the root or fifth. Guthrie also advises singing along to your instrument, playing the melodies that you can sing (Happy Birthday, for example, or the Star Wars theme, whatever), on your instrument. I practiced doing this a bunch and I found that it strengthened a bond between my head, my ears, my singing, and my fingers on the fretboard. This opened up a whole new dimension to my music playing. I now begin to see everything as melodic, everything as notes in relationships to other notes, in relationship to time and space. Wooten’s advice to play the chromatic scale and to be comfortable with mistakes (also a recommendation from Kenny Werner, jazz pianist) allowed me to hear what the “wrong” notes feel like, to sit with them, really experience and know them. I used to have a physical flinch response to wrong notes, and this prevented me from making progress. I still flinch a little inwardly and outwardly, but I’m training and practicing myself to reduce the flinch response. I’ve come to believe that a sufficiently intimate understanding of mistakes and errors is indistiguishable from mastery. Let’s step back and review for a second, revisit the earlier 1-2-3 ideas of “define, solicit, integrate”. My problem was a little too vague, I just “wanted to get better” at playing music, and “wanted to make fewer mistakes”. Still, those are problems that I can make progress in addressing! To make fewer mistakes I need to understand them, meaning I need to experience how the “mistakes” feel. I realize in retrospect that I was flinching away from the feedback that I needed in order to learn and grow as a musician.
Emboldened by this I started looking up advice on youtube, searching for things like “how to play up and down the neck”, and I stumbled upon the CAGED system. This changed my life as a guitar player. Now I already knew that chords are made up of the same notes, meaning a C major chord will be C, E, G anywhere on the neck. As long as you have all those 3 notes, you have a C major chord. You could fret the bass G with your left hand, and tap E and C with your right hand all the way at the top of the neck, and you would technically have played a C chord. So theoretically I knew what it takes to construct a hypothetical C chord anywhere on the neck, and you can kind of try and practice that in a very abstract and detached way. But I found that to be overwhelming and unmanageable, and I didn’t really see a point in doing it.
So turns out there’s an elegant system that people call the CAGED system, and once you learn it you feel really silly because it’s so elegant and intuitive. All of the open chords– C A G E D (hence the name) can be transposed up and down the neck. That’s one of the cool things about guitar. If you take a D major chord, and you move all the notes (so you move your whole hand) up two frets, you now have an E major chord. You can continue going up and down the neck as much as you like. Technically, when we’re playing barre chords, we’re typically taking the E shape or the A shape and moving it up and down the neck. The CAGED system points out that you can do this with the C, G and D chords too. It’s a little less intuitive because of minor complications with the open strings that you’ll have to deal with, but it does work!
So what you can do now is, take a chord, say, A. You can play the open A chord. Next, you can go up to the A on the E string, and here you can play a G shape. Now, unless you’re using a capo, a couple of notes will be basically impossible to fret. G is “320003” (or “320033”). When you move the whole thing up 2 frets, you get 542225, or 542255. Fretting those 2’s is too much of a stretch if you barre the second fret. So what you might do is play 54xx55, muting the strings. That’s an A Major chord! Or you might arpeggiate the notes and play them individually.
Next, you can play 577655 – that’s the E shape! 022300 – moved up five frets! Are you seeing the pattern? A, G, E… next is D! and then C! the shapes loops all the way up and down the neck. AGEDCAGEDCAGED. Once you try this a few times, you’ll start to feel and realize that you can find your way to any major chord anywhere on the neck.
Anyway, so yes – I defined a problem as “how do I get more comfortable playing in different parts of the next”, and it turns out the answer to that was to learn the CAGED system, which indirectly trains you to get familiar with the “rhythm” of the way the notes on a fretboard are – much like, if you’re good at typing on a computer or phone keyboard, you know where the keys are and you don’t have to look for them. The hundreds of individual microtasks of “press the x key” are performed subconsciously, freeing up your conscious attention to focus on higher level things like being expressive, channeling a mood or vibe.
Piano
Something about all of this made me curious about the piano. Because I remember when I was a kid my first introduction to the piano was really terrible. It was made out to be some really intimidating, complicated thing that you had to learn some sort of elaborate math-like language (sheet music) to have the right to play.
Turns out it’s so much simpler to get started than anybody ever told me. First of all, all the white keys make up the C major scale. And also the A minor scale. (And the D Dorian… it goes on.) All of the black keys – which are the sharps and/or flats, make up a pentatonic scale. If you have never played a piano before, never taken a lesson, don’t know anything at all about music, you can still sit at a piano and have fun playing random black notes. This I think is the most important thing when it comes to playing an instrument: you want to experience the pleasure of playing as soon as you can! Nobody learns to play football by first going to class and studying all the rules. You start by learning to kick a ball around. The rules you can learn along the way.
Back to the piano. So, I used to be intimidated by the black keys on the piano, but it turns out that you can play a tremendous number of chords on with just the white keys. If you play three notes in a 1-3-5 pattern on the white keys, you get C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim, C again. Ignore the Bdim, you won’t be using that anytime soon. But C G F Am? You can play loads of songs with that! Em, Dm, Am, G? You can play loads of songs with that too! You can have a lot of fun on the piano with just these 6 chords. And once you get comfortable playing them in the 1-3-5 pattern, and you can do it casually and easily from memory, you can start messing around and learn inversions. Again, we are talking about just the white keys here. You’ll find that you can play different chords by just changing a single finger. For example, you can go from a C to an Em just by moving the C note left by one note to a B. C is C E G, Em is E G B. The B doesn’t have to be the highest note, it can also be the lowest in the triad. (You can play an E bass note with your left hand if you like.) I don’t currently have access to an actual piano or keyboard yet, so I’ve been doing all of this learning on a piano app on my phone.
✱
address the actual problem (substack draft)
I get DMs from people asking for help/advice all the time. Here’s one that fascinated me enough to write a note about it. Someone asked “How do I not be over-analytical?” This is one of those questions that catches my attention because it strikes me as a fake problem, or a wrongly framed problem. What’s wrong with being over-analytical? Being some amount of analytical is not the actual problem. So I ask, Why do you want to be less analytical? And they elaborate, “my analysis is getting in the way, so as to speak.” Getting in the way of what? Is it your relationships? Is it your work/ What is it you actually want? In my experience, the only sustainable way to do less of what you don’t want, is to focus on what oyu do want. I would replace questions like “How do I be less impatient, angry, frustrated” with questions like “How do I be more patient, gentle, calm, serene?” Changing how you frame things changes everything. It’ll actually start to feel like the world is conspiring with you rather than against you. Writing this out, my mind helpfully brings me associations – Uncle Iroh, X-Men First Class, Divergent, Forgiveness. I actually find myself breathing deeper and more slowly as I write this, as my mind generates, loads, recalls other bits from a serene memespace. Sanjay’s Super Team. Neo’s relaxed state at the end of The Matrix. Sleepy-casual ease of pen-spinning, minimal grace, Picasso’s bull, Paula Scher’s state of play. My body relaxed so much I just farted. Palm Ave Khruangbin. Amazing Grace. Zander’s One Buttock Playing.
Anyway the point is. Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Nietzsche’s Yes-Sayer. Marie Kondo had a nervous breakdown trying to get rid of things before she realized she ought to focus on what sparks joy. So what do you enjoy? What sparks joy for you?
✱
found some old notes where i was feeling guilty about spending a lot of time on social media (wasn’t even twitter at the time, I think – mostly… facebook and reddit?). In retrospect that was a misframed problem. “too much X” is imo almost always a cover story for “not enough Y”
✱
make it people-shaped
Advice like “take baby steps” and “make it bite-sized” are excellent, useful directives. A slight issue is that they can seem somewhat condescending. The condescension isn’t necessarily encoded in the text, but it can be interpreted by association. (Really, the condescension is in the person reading it, or to be more precise, in the person’s model of other people when reading it.) Part of the approach here is to attend to the assumptions about why babies and small bites are interpreted to be negative. But another possible parallel approach is to use phrasing like “make things people-sized” or “person-sized”. Maybe “human-sized”. I haven’t figured out which of the three
✱
RECONCEPTUALIZE: Like many of my posts, this was originally a thread on Twitter, but I published it here because I think it’s a very critical part of… doing anything.
A thing i dislike about a lot of advice you’ll find on the internet – and I believe that this is partially a consequence of search engine optimization – is most advice ends up being very tactical. If you struggle with sleep, you’ll encounter a lot of “use blackout blinds, wind down early, put away your phone…”
It’s not just about SEO, it’s also due to the fact that tactical advice is the easiest to give, and it’s seldom wrong. But if you have a wicked problem that you haven’t been able to solve, the issue is rarely bad tactics. most intelligent people with wicked problems already know all the tactics.
The issue is usually something more fundamental. It’s usually about how the problem is framed. It’s about the person’s entire concept of their relationship with X. People don’t need tactics and hacks nearly as much as they need to reconceptualize their relationship with X.
But this is dangerous, scary territory to go to.Advising people to reconceptualize their relationships is tricky fucken business! So for the most part we have this weird world where everyone has problems and everyone offers solutions and nothing much changes.
But when you think about it, it’s obvious, right? change is either superficial or it is not, and thorough change is scary, dangerous, overwhelming, and so like 90% of what we see everywhere is sitcom-grade costume change stuff, basically filler to pass the time.
A stronger way of putting this is – most people frame their problems in ways that are designed to perpetuate those problems. When you see this you can’t unsee it (but you can kind of pretend you don’t see it and distract yourself from it). Some of it is deliberate. Most of it probably isn’t.
But also the thing is – I believe that if you find the 1% or 0.1% of people who are really serious about walking into the crucible of change, and you connect them to each other, build coalitions of them, you will unlock power that the world has only really seen intermittently every few centuries. (Friendly Ambitious Nerd)
✱
Mario Castle Problems
A ”Mario Castle Problem” is a problem that has been misformulated or misinterpreted. If you do somehow solve a Mario Castle Problem, you are rewarded with:
Thank you Mario! But the root of our problem is in another castle!
— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) September 18, 2021
Also consider:
✱
tbc