Line in the Sand

“The only way out is through.” –Winston Churchill

There were no impossible problems in 1941 for Winston Churchill. There was only the sad truth: solve the problem of the Nazi’s advance across Europe, or die. There was a very clear line in the sand: lose Europe, lose the Island, lose the world. Churchill recognized very quickly that there could be no other solution other than total victory. And that was the challenge: the only way out was through.

I’ve talked a little bit about problems, but I haven’t discussed how we determine what problems we should focus on. Unfortunately, there isn’t a nice little buying guide, or a website that will instantly tell you all the issues that come along with solving particular problems. We can’t rely on our thinking to rescue us; we need instead to be able to recognize whether what we are challenged with is worth our time and attention.

Before advancing any further, I would like to mention that the impetus for this particular piece wasn’t brought on by some divine whisper in my ear; rather, it came about by listening to a fantastic podcast done by two stellar guys over at 5by5.tv: Dan Benjamin, the host of the show who has a fantastically soothing voice, and Merlin Mann, who is just an honest guy and clearly a far greater write and thinker than I am. I invite those that have time to listen to check it out.

The issue is never finding a problem to solve. There are an inordinate amount of challenges in the world that haven’t even begun to be addressed. It certainly isn’t for lack of issues to solve that problem-solvers around the world aren’t continually stumped. Rather, it’s about solving the right problems. And identifying the right problems to solve can be much more challenging than solving the problem itself.

What is it, then, that makes a problem right; what are the qualities that make a problem worth solving in the first place? In his talk Mann defines what the characteristics are of a challenges we shouldn’t spend our time on: impossible problems, those that we can never make any true headway on; and boring problems, problems that are either uninteresting in and of themselves or fail to bring us to a more interesting point in our lives. These two axes can be looked at as continuous severity scales: on the abscissa, a problem is defined by its degree of accessibility; on the ordinate, how stimulating a problem is defines where along the axis it will fall.

The issue of course, is that we can’t merely glance at a particular situation and rank just how accessible, just how stimulating it will ultimately turn out to be. The problem about problems, essentially, is that they aren’t necessarily quantifiable; we can’t, for instance, typically look at a patient in a hospital and immediately recognize they’re at risk for an aneurysm. Instead we rely on measuring and observing a problem’s effects on whatever it may be affecting in order to quantify the scope of the situation; a doctor must rely on angiograms, blood pressure readings, etc. in order to determine whether their patients are getting better or worse. Sadly, we can’t merely think at problems, or around them, or about them, or any take any other approach, if we wish to determine whether they are worth our time. We have to begin facing these challenges to determine if they are worth facing, we have to engage ourselves in order to determine if what we are doing is engaging. There are two ways out of a problem: to finish it, or to abandon it. And the only way out is through.

As we approach and begin to put ourselves into these problems, we must be constantly evaluating just how accessible, just how stimulating what we are engaged in is. The challenge then is two-fold: how do we evaluate and quantify the properties of these challenges, and how do we evaluate, and continue to evaluate, whether the challenges we engage in are worth tackling?

Unfortunately, the world isn’t black and white. We often are presented with immediately recognizable challenges that are immediately recognizable as impossible, or boring. The world isn’t filled with Kobayashi Marus, or CSPANs. Instead, we face far more subtle features that define how accessible and stimulating a problem is. Truth be told, there aren’t hard and fast rules that define just where a problem lies in the worthiness space that we’ve defined. But there are certainly signs of each of these features. Typically, the more inaccessible a problem is, the slower the pace of progress feels. Impossible problems typically feel like treadmills; it’s very easy to labor and feel like you’ve gotten work done, but when you step off, you’ve really gotten nowhere. Be wary though, that impossible problems can often disguise themselves with high pace; after all, the treadmill can just as easily go fast as it can go slow, without affecting your ultimate ending destination. If for example, you run for president in the independent party, with no advertising spending, no dishonesty, and no “politics as usual”, you may find that you’re flying along in your campaign. You may find that everyone you meet is genuinely pleased you’re running on such great principles. You may find you’re getting a ton of positive coverage. You may find that you’re making a difference. But, in the end, you’re probably facing an impossible problem;, and that Tuesday on the November of a leap year will likely provide a testament to that impossibility.

And boring problems? We are much more attuned to boredom in our modern-era of instant gratification. But we do need to be aware, at the very least, that not all types of stimulation are good; we can work on something that is intellectually stimulating, but ultimately has little effect on our progress through life. A great example, and perhaps an interesting exception to the rule I’ve just penned are the problems that James Dyson himself has worked on in his life. But delving into that is for another time.

Even if we can effectively plot the problems we are facing in the accessible-stimulating plane, what, inherently, is the use of it if we don’t use our analysis to tell ourselves that what we’re doing isn’t worth our time and attention. It would be easy to say, sitting here reading, “let’s only focus on the most stimulating, and most accessible problems first.” That’s a great goal, if things were that simple, I probably wouldn’t be knee-deep into what is now a thousand-word post. The truth is, we rarely spend our time in that zone. The truth is, we spend a lot of time working on far more boring, far more inaccessible problems. As a student, I’m painfully aware of this. Most of the work I do is either un-stimulating to the point of nausea, because of the assumption that we don’t have the expertise to do more engaging work; or it is far too inaccessible, because of the simple truth that we don’t have the expertise to make the work more accessible. But students accept these pittances of problems because they lead to more interesting, more accessible and more gratifying work.

In the end, it’s about drawing the line in the sand. We all have that wavering line that tells us where we shouldn’t go. It’s a hard line to define and an even harder one to stay true to. It isn’t some invisible barrier that we cross only under pain of death. It’s a fluid, living and breathing thing that both defines us and defines who we are. And it’s very easy to cross; those problems on the other die are often comforting because they are so monotonous, so lacking in any stimulating quality. But we don’t grow as individuals by stepping across that line. We don’t design solutions to problems worth solving the problems below that line. The biggest challenge to actually solving commendable problems is being honest with ourselves to ensure we don’t cross that line. The only way out, the only way to those rich and challenging problems, is through.