When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.

This idea has been expressed by many people (the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck comes to mind, as does Einstein), but to me the clearest and most useful articulation of the underlying... See more

it wasn’t a specific moment like that. It was more the cumulative effect of spending 36 years trying things and failing and learning a little bit here and there, and—mostly over the last four and a half years—having a few conceptual breakthroughs. Most of the insights, interestingly, came after my wife Johanna decided to turn the derelict grounds... See more

If you map the context well enough, the solution will reveal itself.

And it wasn’t enough to respect the context. What we put in needed to make the already-existing stronger . This also applied to the other aspects of the context, the architecture, the ecology... And it applied to the part of the context that was us —the garden should make us feel more alive and encourage us to engage in the activities we want to... See more

I often got fixated on a solution before I’d actually understood the details of the problem. This is a common and strong human tendency: to distort our understanding of the problem to make our preconceived solution look like the right answer. Obviously, this makes it harder to see what the right solution is. You won’t be as attentive to the... See more

When I was younger and felt lost and alienated by life, I was always stretching for a solution, something that could get me out of my predicament. I applied to university, I switched majors, I started companies. But I wasn’t paying attention to the context. I didn’t see who I was or how the world works, and it didn’t strike me that I could map this... See more

Luckily, each constraint that you map reduces the search space, making it easier to see what the right answer is.

If you map the context well enough, the solution will reveal itself.

When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.