5 Ways to Cope During a Life Crisis

One of the great things about a life crisis is you get to find out what works. When life is easy and no major challenges are on the horizon, you can read all about affirmations, pray, meditate, firewalk or just read self-help manuals written by big-name gurus. Then life throws you a major health challenge, the end of a relationship, the death of somebody close to you and an unexpected job loss. Now what?

Will you turn to a book, seek professional help, and meditate some more or just fall apart at the seams? This is when you get to find out what really works and what doesn’t. Here are a few ideas that have worked time and time again for people who wanted to turn their lives around after experiencing a life crisis. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Purpose of Adversity

It’s all over the news.
You can’t avoid it.
No matter how much we try to deny it…

The world is coming to an end. (Play eerie music here)

Just this year alone we have had a prediction about the end of the world or rapture. The U.S. Government has been downgraded by S&P. Greece and Spain are in utter disarray. People are being laid off, losing their homes and are quickly watching the balances of their retirement savings diminish. I mean with times like this what is the purpose of going on? We might as well give up now. It looks like all is lost, right? Read the Rest of This Article »

Why There’s No Magic Bullet Solution

Ever seen an ad promising that you can “lose 30lbs in a month” or “make $$$ working from home part-time – with no experience”?

It’s tempting to believe that there’s a magic bullet, some way to fix our problems quickly and easily – without any effort, self-discipline or hard work.

And marketers know that this is how we think. They promise to spill the secrets, teach us easy tips that change our lives radically. They go for highly emotive issues like weight loss and money.

The problem is, there’s no magic bullet. There never is. Read the Rest of This Article »

Simple Problem Solving: The Solution Within the Problem

Sometimes I have a problem I just can’t seem to solve. Like the other day when I left my car at a friends house and had no way to get to my appointment across town. I tried calling friends for a ride, but no one was picking up. Just when I was about to cancel the appointment, I remembered I left my car at a different friend’s house, the one who lives 2 blocks away!

I love telling this story because it reinforces the idea that the solution is always contained within the problem. If had taken a second to write down my problem, it would have gone something like this:

“I need to get to an appointment and my car is at a friend’s house.”

The solution to the problem starts right where the problem left off:

“My car is at a friend’s house, a friend that lives 2 blocks away.”

This particular situation is one of the more obvious examples of how you can find the solution contained within the problem, but I have had success applying this concept to more complex problems as well. This led me to break down the concept into a process that can be repeated over and over again.

Here is my 3-step process to find the solution hidden within any problem: Read the Rest of This Article »

How to Solve Every Problem

What makes solving problems difficult is that we often don’t know everything that we need to solve in order to be able to move forward.

Every problem you face will always present you with at least 3 obstacles.

To be able to overcome the problem you have to identify the 3 chief obstacles and solve them, otherwise you won’t be able to fully remove the problem from your path.

Usually we just solve 1 or 2 obstacles, since they are the obvious parts, but we tend to miss the less obvious parts, which stops us from completely removing the problem from our path. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Most Common Pitfalls in Problem Solving

As a graduating engineer myself, I have often found myself hard pressed to solve a particular problem. Everyone experiences these kinds of situations more or less frequently, and even though every single mind has its methods and nuances in how it approaches problem solving in general, there are common pitfalls that everyone seems to fall into. I would theorize this phenomena is related to the structure of thought itself – our highly pattern-based thinking is optimized by evolution to solve certain problems, which comes at a cost. Exploring the biological and physical origins of these phenomena, while certainly interesting, will not be pursued in this short essay, both due to my lack of qualifications on those subjects and the goal of the writing of the essay. What I do intend is to provide insight into some the top three common pitfalls, so you may recognize them when you inevitably run into them. If the short time it takes to read this essay spares someone an afternoon of head-banging, then it will already have been worth it.

As the astute reader will notice throughout the essay, most (but not all) of these pitfalls are related to thinking habits and employment of otherwise good thinking strategies to the wrong problems. At every pitfall I will try to provide an illustrative example, and I’m sure more than a few readers will remember themselves in past experiences where they, too, walked in circles in a frustrating battle against a seemingly unsolvable problem of the same nature. I would also like to point out that in most cases an equilibrium must be found, as for every pitfall there is also the opposite equivalent. Having that said, I’ll begin by exposing a well known thinking flaw. Read the Rest of This Article »

Thinking Around Corners – A New Perspective On Creative Thought

In Japan, blind corners are everywhere. The roads are narrow and walls extend right out to meet the curb. It is inconvenient at best, deadly at worst. From the driver’s seat of a car there is just no way to see what is around the corner.

The only help is a mirror on the other side of the intersection. If you look into the mirror, it is like you are standing in a different position. It is like you cross the road, and now have a clear view straight around the corner. This is the only way to see around blind corners. Looking from this different position makes the way forward obvious. Read the Rest of This Article »