Get good at staying with unsolved problems
This is one of the key practices that people don’t talk about: Holding an unsolved problem in your mind without trying to solve it.
There’s two big reasons it’s a valuable skill:
You have a lot of stuck habits, some of which are useful, some of which are harmful, but breaking out of them is tricky. A habit is just a way in which you solve a problem intuitively, automatically. If you can learn the skill of holding back that solution seeking, then you can find other ways to solve the problem.
Often, solution seeking is a way to avoid spending time thinking about a problem. The problem itself is painful, so you want to solve it as fast as you can. But pain when thinking will constrain your thoughts, limiting your freedom. Learning to embrace the pain of my problems has opened up new and exciting possibilities for me.
Try it now: Pick an arithmetic problem that isn’t immediately obvious to you, but you’re confident that you could solve with a little thinking. I’ll provide a sample list below. See if you can keep your attention on the problem without jumping to solving it.
- 7+8
- 12+14
- 37+37
- 166 + 178
- 1748 + 1877
- 148 * 122
If you’re anything like me, keeping your brain from jumping to solving it is really hard!