Tag / problem-solving

by Nathan Coumbe

Luck happens

Sometimes, it comes down to sheer luck.

You’re sitting in the right booth, reading the right book, and someone notices.

She comes over and asks what it is that you do; you proceed to tell her how you help people. Eyes light up, connections are made, recommendations are given to you about who else you can help with your craft.

What a lucky meeting!

And yet…if I hadn’t been working so diligently for months on my new endeavors, this lucky encounter never would have occurred. Had I been sitting in the booth watching Netflix, she would have walked right past me.

So yeah, luck happens, but it still pays to prepare and practice your craft so that you are ready when the lucky moments occur.

I’ll take slow, persistent effort sheer luck any day.

by Nathan Coumbe

Solve interesting problems

One of my passions, and pain points, is the state of modern education in the US. Everyone knows that it’s not working well: children are leaving schools, both public and college-level, less prepared for careers than ever before.

The reason is simple: schools are operating on outdated modes of education in which students are taught to sit still, obey, memorize lots of information, regurgitate it on a test, and then promptly forget everything they just memorized.

The creative ones, the wiggle worms, speakers, artists, drawers, engineers – they are all stifled in the name of obedience. Yes, I realize that to have 35 kids in a classroom, you can’t have them all doing their own weird and wacky things, but answer this question for me:

When was the last time you got paid to regurgitate information on a standardized test?

What is school for? Seth Godin asks this question often. I believe the answer should be to educate and prepare children and young adults to create, innovate, contribute, and solve interesting problems for society. It is not about asking, “Will this be on the test?”

None of the “tests” you face in real life are multiple choice, with answers you found in a textbook and memorized only to forget them a hour later. When an irate customer is standing in front of you, there is no clear, right answer. There is an answer that might make things better or not; it’s up to you to figure that out.

When a new idea is dropped on your desk by a leader, you have to collaborate with your team, find and utilize resources, synthesize information, and come up with a solution for the project. How is memorizing a bunch of unrelated information that is kept separate from other information in the spirit of division called “subjects” helpful in this regard?

Why not instead teach people how to solve interesting problems? Teach how to find answers to questions on their own, how to create connections between information across varying fields and periods of time, how to think, and more importantly, how to learn when formal education stops.

Greg McKeown triggered this train of thought for me in his book Essentialism when he wrote the following:

“What if schools eliminated busywork and replaced it with important projects that made a difference to the whole community? What if all students had time to think about their highest contribution to their future so that when they left high school they were not just starting on the race to nowhere?”

Greg McKeown, Essentialism

The Industrial Age in the United States has ended; factory work is quickly becoming a thing of the past, as much as parts of our culture want to hang on to it. Our schools cannot continue teaching in the same mold as as they used to, when everyone eventually went to work on an assembly line. Employers no longer need cogs in machines; they need creative thinkers and problem-solvers equipped with the skills of communication, collaboration, analysis, leadership, and learning (yes, it is a skill).

In short, we need to teach people how to solve interesting problems.

by Nathan Coumbe

Teaching how to fail

What did you learn about failure in school?

I learned to avoid it at all costs – if it wasn’t a good sentence, don’t write it. If you weren’t sure if the answer you just worked out in algebra was correct, you should probably go back and rework the whole thing. If you can’t draw very well, you just shouldn’t draw anything, because it won’t be good enough for anything.

You see where I am going with this; our educational system is so caught up in compliance, with getting the correct answer, with mastering the test, that the experience of failure is drilled out of us. Better not to do anything than to do something incorrectly.

So we have students going to college that can’t write well because they never learned how to write. They never learned how to write because they were too afraid of doing it badly, which is exactly what you have to do to get better. Start by writing poorly until you get better.

We have adults that cannot draw because they’ve told themselves they are bad at it, so they quit drawing. In actuality, everyone has the potential to learn to draw, you just have to get the right teacher (as an aside, not every artist knows how to teach someone how to draw well).

We have students who are so afraid of getting the wrong answer in a math class, or writing a bad line of code in a coding class, that they don’t put anything down – they don’t even try to work it out and get partial credit because it isn’t the right answer. If they only started, if they only put down the code that might work, they would eventually work it out until they got the right answer.

Leonardo da Vinci, arguably the greatest genius to ever live, failed at so many projects, works of art, and inventions that if you held up his successes next to his failures, we would probably classify him as a failure. But that’s not why we remember him, and that’s not how we measure success and failure.

He persevered and kept trying.

He knew that failure was the best teacher of all, which led him to create some of the greatest works of art in history and to imagine ideas and inventions centuries ahead of his time.

We don’t need to teach our students how to find all the right answers; we need to teach them to try to find an answer to an interesting problem, not the answer a test problem. It might be the wrong answer; that’s okay – just keep working to solve it.

Keep writing bad stuff until the good ideas start to come out.

Keep drawing until your left brain gets out of the way of your right brain, and you start to draw better.

Don’t teach the test; don’t teach the correct answer.

Teach how to ask better questions, how to analyze, how to lead others.

Teach perseverance in the face of adversity and failure.

by Nathan Coumbe

Your time is not for sale

One of the members of the 48 Days Eagles group posted a quote today which prompted some ideas I’d like to share.

“Our time is not for sale.”

Brene Brown, Dare to Lead

Two points I’d like to make:

Number one – being compensated for our time is a dreadful, soul-sucking way to make a living, a remnant of days long past, days spent mindlessly working as a cog in the machine that was factory work.

What is more satisfying than getting paid for results that you create or for thoroughly completing a job? Would you rather show up, punch the clock, and work half-heartedly through a mind-numbing shift where the minutes, not the work, are the only thing that matter for your compensation?

Why not instead go solve a problem? Find something that needs solving and do it, then get paid for it. Then go solve another problem and get paid for that, too.

Number two – our time is the most precious commodity each of us own, and therefore it cannot be squandered away. We are here for the blink of an eye – this time cannot be wasted staring at a clock or wasting away in front of a screen; it must be spent wisely. We are each here for a specific purpose, and we’ve been given a limited amount of time to fulfill that purpose. Don’t waste this precious gift.

Go find an interesting problem, try to solve it, get paid, and then do it again.

by Nathan Coumbe

How to learn anything

Do it.

The thing you want to learn how to do? Start doing it.

Start writing. Start playing the drums. Start drawing. Start reading the classics. Start creating a podcast.

How do you learn how to speak another language? Any teacher worth her salt will tell you that you have to immerse yourself in the language and start speaking it. All the books and college courses in the world won’t help you if you don’t do it.

This is scary, isn’t it? The resistance in your head is telling you that you don’t know where to start or that you can’t possibly learn how to do this or that without a rigorous amount of study. If you don’t know where to start, then yes – go and pick up a book. Watch a YouTube video or download an app. Hire a teacher. But all the reading about it, watching videos about it, being lectured to about it – that won’t get you anywhere until you take action. Once you have a grip on the basics, you just have to start doing.

Learning is easy once you start doing it. Taking action is what’s difficult.

by Nathan Coumbe

Ask someone

Sometimes the easiest way to get an answer, the easiest way to get unstuck, is to just ask a question.

Want to know what comes next for you in your career? Ask your leader what he thinks.

Want to know how to market your latest work? Get around people who do it and ask them how they did it.

Want to know if the person you are dating will marry you? Ask them (hopefully not too soon).

Sometimes it is best to get out of your own head, away from the fear and uncertainty, and just ask someone a question.

by Nathan Coumbe

Progress

Sometimes the progress you get isn’t necessarily the progress you wanted or expected.

You might be trying to lose inches around your waist, only to get to measurement day and discover that result didn’t happen, but your shoulders, arms, and legs grew slightly bigger and more muscular.

Progress.

A really challenging exercise or song being learned on the guitar doesn’t sound any better, but you notice your fingers don’t hurt anymore from the biting of the strings, and your wrist technique has improved.

Progress.

Progress is change in a forward direction. Look for it everywhere, not just in the one thing on which you happen to be focusing.

Progress: notice it everywhere, celebrate it often, and keep trying to create it.

Progress.

by Nathan Coumbe

Make time for your mind

I am always amazed at the quality of thoughts that I have when taking a shower. Some of my most poignant ideas occur not long after I close the curtain. Solutions to problems, blog topics, business ideas – they all seem to happen while I am standing in the shower.

Why?

I am completely undistracted; there is no waterproof cell phone in there with me. My brain checks out of the actions of the moment as my body automatically goes through the routine, and the brain is allowed to work its magic. This was not always true, though, as I used to bring my cell phone into the bathroom and blast music or a podcast or an audiobook. These quirks may seem harmless, yes, but my daily shower is some of the only truly undistracted time I have.

Our access to technology has our brain so constantly distracted that it seems few of us are having the “a-HA” moments that we need to improve ourselves and the lives of others. This is not a rant against technology but simply a call to action for you to work a few moments of distraction-free thinking into your day.

You’ll need a few things:

  1. Peace and quiet
  2. A notebook and a pen or pencil
  3. A timer (only if you truly need to keep track of your time, as I do when I am on a break at work)

Spend just a few minutes letting your mind wander; write down any thoughts you have which might seem significant to you. They may seem trivial, you may worry that other people think they are stupid or poor-quality (they aren’t), but write them down anyway. This is just for you.

I use my daily shower for this as well as my lunch break and the few breaks throughout my workday to just sit and think – no phone, no social media, no email, just my notebook, a pen, and my thoughts.

What do I write down?

  • Questions
  • Answers to questions
  • Business ideas
  • Problems
  • Solutions to problems I have at work and in my personal life
  • Observations of things I see around me (there is one entry in my journal about a very interesting bird…)
  • Drawings
  • Lists
  • Workouts
  • Music practice sessions
  • General randomness

Write whatever you want. Let your stream of consciousness take over for a few minutes. It is a wonderful feeling once you get used to doing it.

Everyone needs to carry a notebook with them at all times, something I learned from this amazing book (click here), and everyone needs to sit with their thoughts for a few minutes throughout the day. You will be amazed at how much better you will feel, how many good ideas you have, and how much more curious and excited about the world you will be. Try it out! Make it a habit for the next month to get 5 minutes a day of thinking time.

You don’t have to take your notebook in the shower – just leave it on the back of the toilet tank like I do.

by Nathan Coumbe

Irony

My reading today got me thinking about education and our attempts to fix it. A bunch of people who grew up in the industrial education system we know today are trying to fix and/or revamp the way we learn using the very education they seek to change.

I have hope, though. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, a lot of failures, and a lot of bravery on the part of us that seek to make it work. If we seek to push through and get it right, however, it will be worth every second.

by Nathan Coumbe

Make time for happy

I’ve been dealing with a most ridiculous, and at times comically awful, situation for the last month or so. Yesterday, things came to a head. I won’t go into the details here, but I do wish to share with you my reaction to the situation.

By the time all was said and done, I was absolutely furious. Rage was seeping from my pores; my body was on the verge of convulsion because of how badly I was shaking. I got in my car (slamming the door, of course) and sat and seethed for a few moments more. Then I began to think about how I was thinking and feeling.

Human beings are unique in this respect: we can think about how we think. Because of this, we also get to choose how we react in a given situation. (Read Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and you can get more into this.) I had a choice – I could be mad, or I could let it go.

I chose mad.

I sat in my car, and I consciously decided, then and there, that I was going to be mad. This situation was so awful, so asinine, that I couldn’t just let it go! I had to be mad.

With a catch.

I gave myself a time limit (a trick I learned from reading the works of Zig Ziglar). It was 4:30pm – I needed to drive home and spend the evening with my wife. Now why would I make my wonderful wife miserable because I was having such a hard time? I decided I would be mad – for a period.

“Nathan,” I said aloud, “6pm. That’s how long you have to be mad. At six o’clock, you are going to let it go, and you are going to be spend a nice evening with your wife. Until 6pm you can be mad as hell.”

5:15pm

By about 5:15pm, I decided it was too exhausting to be mad. I told my wife what I had done, what I had decided, and she laughed. Her whole face lit up; it was as though a weight had been lifted off of her shoulders, not just mine. She thought that my whole monologue was hilarious, wonderful, and one of the best things that I could have done. We splurged and got pizza, ice cream, tater tots, and ended up having a nice evening together.

Be mad – with a catch.

Go ahead – react appropriately to the situations in your life. Sometimes they stink. Sometimes they really stink. Just don’t live in the garbage. Give yourself a time limit.