Stop Running Headfirst into Problems

The Trap of External Solutions

When we feel stuck, our instinct is to look outside ourselves:

• A new direction in our business


• A different project


• A change of scenery, traveling to an exotic location

But here's a powerful alternative:

Use your dissatisfaction as fuel for inner growth.

Instead of chasing external solutions, focus on changing yourself.

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SEEKING FIXES

Problems? Do you suffer from them? Seek fixes for them? The world sure is right now.

And a billion-dollar industry—self-help, motivation, coaching, and counseling—even stands primed to help us deal. The scientific community these days too. It claims to know what’s right.

But how are we doing?

With the evolution of these fields and their e... See more

SEEKING FIXES

Problems? Do you suffer from them? Seek fixes for them? The world sure is right now.

And a billion-dollar industry—self-help, motivation, coaching, and counseling—even stands primed to help us deal. The scientific community these days too. It claims to know what’s right.

But how are we doing?

With the evolution of these fields and their e

... See more

“The practices that carry the greatest potential for transformative change are usually counter- instinctual.” I take him to mean that if you’re trying to get better at life in some way– more patient, or better at listening, or less prone to procrastination or anxiety or self- sabotage– the necessary actions are pretty much guaranteed not to feel es

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Whatever else happens, stay busy. (I always lean on this wise advice, from the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton, on how to survive melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.”) Find something to do—anything, even a different sort of creative work altogether—just to take your mind off your anxiety and pressure. Once, when I was strug

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Problems are typically richer than our preconceived notions about how to solve them. We can learn this the hard way, by failing and then failing again but failing better. But there are often shortcuts to be found if you are willing to spend more time mapping the landscape.

But for the things you care about most, or are causing you the most suffering, there is probably a nonlinear strategy that you will miss if you pay too close attention to the linear strategy you current have or that people recommend.