A guy walking home one evening sees his neighbor staring at the street under a lamppost. "What are you looking for?" he asks.
"My house keys," the neighbor says. "I dropped them in the yard."
"Then why are you looking here?"
"The light's better."
That's a very old joke that comes up in my practice on a regular basis. [1] Why? Because it's how we often approach problem-solving. Rather than solve the problem that needs to be solved, we solve a problem that we want to solve.
Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved is outside our area of expertise. So we find another problem to solve, one that's under the lamppost, where the light's better.
Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved will take a long time to solve, and we want to feel "productive." So we find a whole bunch of little problems to solve that we can check off our to-do list.
Sometimes the problem that needs to be solved may truly be insoluble, and we're scared of trying and failing and looking foolish. So we find an easier problem to solve, one that will burnish our image and our ego.
These are all very understandable responses. Solving hard problems isn't merely an intellectual exercise, and sometimes we simply don't have what it takes to grope around in the dark, flailing endlessly, and occasionally having to admit defeat. But when we routinely limit ourselves to simple, small and solvable problems, we never develop the capacity to do anything else. Our comfort zones only grow when we get outside them.
This doesn't mean we should view ourselves harshly, without compassion. The fortitude to confront the problems that need to be solved can be derived from many sources, but it's more readily accessible when we invest in self-care practices that put us in the right state of mind and body. [2] Even then, we may lack confidence in our ability to solve these problems, but as I've noted before, "Confidence is a calculation of the odds of success. Courage is a calculation that the cost of not trying is higher than the cost of failing." [3]
And that latter calculation is far easier to make when we accept that our efforts to solve hard problems will often fail. This doesn't mean that we should be blasé or cavalier about failure. But when we view such failures as learning opportunities--"the ruling out of possibilities," in Peter Attia's phrase [4]--we realize that it's actually riskier to keep looking under the lamppost, where the light is, and the solutions to meaningful problems will only be found out there, in the dark.
Footnote
[1] Apparently this joke was a staple of American newspapers starting in the 1920s.
[2] Investments, Not Indulgences
[4] The Ruling Out of Possibilities
For Further Reading
The Traps We Set for Ourselves
Photo by Abeeha Batool.
