Your problems are boring
or they're amazing. It's all about perspective and brainstorming.
Today’s creativity booster:
A young woman is told to never open the locked cellar door or she would be in big trouble. One day, she decides to force open the door. After opening it, she never returns to the house again.
See the answer at the end.
Much like this young woman, we’re told certain things from a young age and those things stick with us for most of our life, yet we never question them.
Why do we eat 3 times per day? European settlers. Lunch, funny enough, became important during the industrial revolution because workers needed a source of energy during the work day.
Why is breakfast the most important meal of the day? Marketing.
When it comes to being creative, 9 out of 10 times it’s not about having a brilliant idea or response to something.
It’s about asking the right questions.
Questions that start with “why” and “how” are usually good.
It’s especially good if you ask those questions on tough subjects. If it feels like you shouldn’t ask that question, it means you probably should.
Asking questions you haven’t heard before is also great.
Most people, however, get fixated on the “right answer”. Education does that to us - because there’s no open answers when we’re growing up, you’re either wrong or you’re right.
If presented with a puzzle, you have to find the one correct answer.
Whereas what we are doing here does not have a single answer. A few people wrote back saying the answer to various exercises I posted is not correct - that they know a different one.
That’s. The. Point.
If there’s a single correct answer to a problem, it’s most likely not an interesting problem.
Struggle to find interesting problems.
Struggle to find issues where people don’t agree. Unfortunately, we want people’s approval so it’s easier to fall prey to a train of thought that most people praise and support.
And once you find a potential solution, try it out. Unless you’re in an academia or in a sterile research environment, try to bring things to life as fast as possible.
Seeing them perform in a live environment will make a world of difference.
Some will work, some won’t. But at least you won’t have to wonder anymore.
Answer: the woman was being kept prisoner in the basement.
Multiple versions of this one out there, you might have seen it, but it’s still a great example of shifting perspective.