The Element of Seeing All Problems as Puzzles and Its Hope for Becoming Master Solvers

A scene from Looking for Bobby Fischer, a great movie about chess every one of us should see

Do you like puzzles?

I know you do.

When I asked you which movies these lines were from, “Despite the fact that there are over eight million people on the island of Manhattan, there are times you still feel shipwrecked and alone. Times even the most resourceful survivor would feel the need to put a message in a bottle, or on an answering machine.” in one of my recent posts, Ajay was quick to go online, get the answer and respond back with it.

I don't think there is a human being on this earth who doesn't like solving a puzzle, whether it’s a crossword puzzle, a sudoku puzzle, or figuring out the answers to things. I don't know about you, but I feel thrilled whenever I am able to beat a Jeopardy contestant to an answer.

I think why I enjoy being a Commissions Consultant is because there are puzzles to solve and I enjoy finding new tricks to solve them.

In my last full time Commissions Analyst job, we used a software program called Centive to calculate commissions.  The zip code tables in Centive would only permit the entry of 5 digit numeric zips.  This was a problem, because we had a few Canada reps and Latin America reps. The system was not designed for us to enter the alpha numeric Canada zips or the long Latin America zips. One day, it struck me we could make up 5 digit zip codes for Canada and Latin America.  We needed only a few because there were just a handful of Canada reps and Latin America reps.  I created the made up zips. Thereafter, we just needed to replace the Canada and Latin America zips in our data with these made up zips before uploading the data to Centive and voila – we were able to credit the Canada and Latin America reps correctly for their deals.

I know a Commissions Analyst job sounds mundane, but we do have puzzles to solve every now and then and it gives us the opportunity to get creative.

Which leads me to believe that there must be opportunities to get creative in every job.

All it needs is a problem which needs solving.

The shower is one place where solutions to problems and puzzles are handily hatched.

Another is when we are in bed, typically when we are half awake, half asleep.

Sometimes we may wake up in the middle of the night with an idea.

It was during an afternoon lie-down, I got the idea to go online and search for advanced Excel solutions to filter data.

I was on my White Hat security assignment at the time.

I googled various search terms for filtering data and soon stumbled upon some wonderful sites including Excel is Magic.

Within hours, I had created macros involving Sumifs and Advanced Filters and it helped me solve some crediting problems for White Hat.

Sometimes the solution to a puzzle is to break things apart.

One day I was working with another Xactly implementation consultant and we were both having trouble trying to make a long formula work. I suddenly had a brainwave.  “Hey,” I said, “would breaking the formula in two and creating two results work?”

We gave it a try and found out it did. Yeah!

When you think about it, every problem we encounter in life is really a puzzle to be solved.

Even not liking something is a puzzle to be solved.

For example, if reverberating sounds are coming through the floor of your apartment from the loud music being played by the downstairs neighbors, you can complain to the apartment managers, request the neighbors to turn the music down, go out and hope that when you return they would have turned it off, turn up your tv to drown the sound out, wear ear plugs, and if nothing works and the problem is repetitive…move out, recognizing that you are an auditory person and silence is an important need for you.

Once when I was at a party in our apartment complex, the host put on some music and everyone started dancing. The hour was late and I wondered if one of the residents from the neighboring apartments would complain. Apartment life is fraught with that risk. Luckily, no one did.

But one of the people at the party shared a trick with us to avoid complaints from neighbors.  He said he always invited all his neighbors to his parties – that way, he knew they would not complain about the noise – it would be too impolite after having been invited.

I thought that was smart.

Different situations will give us new puzzles to solve.

When I took my daughter to her medical appointments, the puzzle I had to solve was how not to lose my cool at being made to wait for the doctor for up to 40 minutes in a small, airless and windowless consulting room.

I would start getting impatient after the first 10 minutes.  After the next 10 minutes, I would get irritable.  By the time the doctor arrived, which was usually after 30 minutes or more, I would have turned into a Frankenstein.

I would bark at the doctor and be quite unpleasant throughout the consultation. I would embarrass Tanita no end.

After doing this for years, one day I had a brainwave.   After the nurse finished taking Tanita's temperature, weight and height and she was about to lead us to the consulting room, I said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I would like to sit out in the waiting room.  I have a claustrophobia problem and I do not like being cooped up in the consulting room.”

Of course, the nurse couldn’t say no to that.  So from then on, every time we went to an appointment, we would get to wait out the time till we saw the doctor in the waiting room instead of the consulting room.  Though the wait was long, it didn’t seem as long or as unbearable, because we could people watch and stretch our legs.

“But Minoo, that's resorting to a lie.  You don’t really have a claustrophobia problem! That doesn't sound right”.

No, I don’t. But frankly, what I have is worse than a claustrophobia problem. Being in a small airless room for that long really turns me into a monster no doctor would want to deal with.

So the claustrophobia was a great solution for me, for Tanita, as well as for the doctor.

All kinds of situations present puzzles.

Say you are interviewing for a job.  Can you prove how much you know and how capable you are, even before joining the company? How would you solve that puzzle?  I came up with my own idea to solve this and in fact used it when I went to interview for my current assignment.  You can read what I did here.

How do you make a dry subject interesting?  That's a puzzle. See how Ajay, who guest posts for me, solved that puzzle in his 3- part Oh Bangalore series of posts.  You may also be interested in the tips I shared in my Mmm....Mmmm...Good post. 

How do you make the most use of the resources you have and the constraints you have to operate with? That’s a puzzle.  It can lead to inventive solutions and marvelous discoveries. For me, it led to the discovery of avocado pani puri.

How do you become a better investor? That's a perennial puzzle for most of us.  And each of us will solve it in our own way.  And we will learn lessons along the way.  And maybe more lessons.

The answer to a puzzle can lie in the periphery of our vision, as reader Ananda says.  So you have to look beyond the periphery for answers.

Many times when we think there is no answer or no solution to some problem or puzzle, it turns out there is.

Have you heard of neuro-linguistic programming?

It’s a form of psychology and it is very effective in curing people of stubborn phobias and ideas.

Expert NLP practitioners can work miracles.

Have you heard the story of the guy in a mental hospital who thought he was Jesus Christ for years and years?

2 NLP experts cured him of the idea.

This is how they did it…..

On their first visit, they shook hands with the man and said “You’re Jesus Christ, right?” and the man was absolutely delighted.

Then they came back in a few days and brought with them a measuring tape.  They started measuring the man.

He said, “Hey what are you doing that for?” They said, “Oh it’s just for something we’re going to need to do in a few days.”

They came back to see him a few days later.  This time they brought long pieces of wood with them.  Now they measured the man and then they measured the wood.  They started sawing the pieces of wood to match the measurements they had taken of the man.

The man was perturbed, “What’s going on?” he said.  They simply replied, “You are Jesus Christ, is that right?” He said, “yes, but what are you doing?” “You’ll find out, soon” they said.

They came back in a few days with nails.  They asked the man to hold out his palms. They placed a nail against the palm of each of his hands to see if it would be a fit and nodded their heads indicating the nails would be a good fit.

The man couldn’t take it anymore. “What are you going to do?  You can’t do that to me” he shouted. They said calmly, “Sorry sir, we are just carrying out orders. You are Jesus Christ, aren’t you?”

“I am not (expletive) Jesus Christ,” the man shouted. “You’re not,” they said, “Oh, well then, okay, we are sorry to have bothered you.” And they left.

The man never called himself Jesus Christ from that day. He was cured.

The miracles achieved through NLP show us that even stubborn ideas and problems can be solved.

Sometimes the answer to a puzzle is the opposite of what you would expect it to be.

My daughter’s major is industrial engineering.

She is a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and on the mailing list for the Industrial Engineers magazine.

The other day, I was leafing through one of the issues and I read about a case study.

A company which was having a problem with a high volume of defective products coming off the assembly line recruited a consulting company to come up with solutions to improve assembly line operations and reduce the incidence of defective products. 

The consultants tested different assembly line speeds to see if it had any impact on the volume of defective products.

They discovered that running the assembly line slower, led to fewer defective products.

So they recommended the company reduce the speed at which the assembly line operated.  This would cause the company to turn out fewer products per day, but the number of defective products would come down, and the company would be able to cut down on the number of employees which were employed in reworking the defective products.

Unfortunately, the union obstructed the change because it would involve job cuts. 

The company did not heed the advice of the consultants and eventually folded because of the high cost of reworking and the customers lost to defective products.

What I was fascinated by was the fact that “going slower” was the answer to having fewer defects.

It made me think that speed is not always of the essence.

There are some people who I work with or who I have worked with who are methodical and slow in their approach.

Because they are methodical and slow in their approach, they get things right at the first go.

Whereas, I am sometimes too hasty in doing something and sometimes have to do it over because of that.

After reading the article, I made a note to myself to try to do everything a little slower.

Are there any activities in your life which would benefit from a slower approach?  

The puzzles of human nature and human relationships are infinite and also intriguing.

Why do people do what they do and what would cause them to change?

My relationship with my daughter Tanita was a problem and a puzzle to me for years.  This was during her middle school and early high school years.

Tanita did things I thought she should not do in those years. When I scolded her, tears would roll down her face and she would promise never to do them again.

But sooner or later, I would catch her doing the very same things.

It was a puzzle to me why she would “disobey me” and “go against my wishes.”

Why did she promise to stop the behavior but then not stop?

One day, I reflected on it and it dawned on me…..

Tanita was growing into a young adult, and she naturally wanted to differentiate herself from me.

She wanted to feel, “I am not a mini Mom.  I can make my own choices.”

As long as I obstructed this desire to differentiate herself, she had to go behind my back and do what she wanted to do.

I realized it was pointless to try and scold her into stopping.

I decided to relax and let her make a few mistakes.

It would not be the end of the world if she tried a few things (I made mistakes in my time, too, and I am still alive and kicking today, aren’t I?).

So I gave up my Tiger Mom ways and my Helicopter Mom ways and adopted a Hippie Mom approach.

It is much easier for Tanita to relate to and be friends with Hippie Mom.

Hippie Mom doesn’t go ballistic like Tiger Mom.

Hippie Mom doesn’t become frantic like Helicopter Mom.

Tanita and I now have a great relationship.

My experience suggests that no matter how problematic any of our relationships are, we need to remember every problem is, in essence, a puzzle….and we just may need to find the solution to that puzzle.

And the solution could be giving up our Tiger Mom, Hippie Mom, Tyrannical Dad or Nag Wife ways.

In the book Whistling Vivaldi, the author who is black, tells us he used to whistle a Vivaldi tune when white people walked by him.  He did this to communicate to them that they did not need to be afraid of him. It was his shorthand way of saying, “Don’t worry. I am not from the hood. You don’t have to be scared of me.  See I whistle Vivaldi – that should tell you something about the kind of guy I am.”

The subject of his book is about how race affects the performance of black boys in elite white schools.  While it is sad the author felt he had to whistle Vivaldi to appear non-threatening to white people when he walked by them, I thought whistling a Vivaldi tune an effective device to establish the kind of person you are when you meet strangers on the street.

At one time in our life or another, we all will face the challenge of wanting people to see us differently.  All through my career in the US, I have chafed at being stereotyped, at being thought of as a curry eating person from the land of Hari Krishna Hari Rama and a bean counter who calculates commissions.

So recently, I came up with a device to make people see me in a multi-dimensional way. 

I wrote up a note in which I talked about my 3 hats – my writing hat, my commissions analyst hat and my motherhood hat.

I have been handing out this note at the end of every interview for a prospective assignment.

The note has helped me solve the puzzle of wanting to be seen for the multi-dimensional person I am. It was also free publicity for my blog.  Double win.

Of course to see a problem as a puzzle, we need to be in a resourceful state.

If our brain is hijacked by our amygdala, such as when we are upset or anxious or angry, we will be overwhelmed by our problem and unable to think creatively or resourcefully.  We will be in fight or flight mode, which is not useful for solving puzzles at all.

If you find yourself getting angry, upset or anxious about something, do whatever you can to return to a resourceful state – one in which you see every problem as a puzzle to be solved and you take delight in solving it.

Here’s to more of us seeing problems as puzzles and learning to become master solvers of them.

Nothing could be better than that.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week…..M…..a Pearl  Seeker like you.  Thanks to Ajay, Ananda and Subhakar for their comments on my last post The Element of Making Choices in Accordance with the Laws of Nature, the Laws of Money and the Laws of Human Nature and Its Hope for Prospering, and thanks to the rest of you for your votes and pins. Much appreciated.