M2M Day 258: How to overcome a loss in momentum
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.
Yesterday, I solved the Saturday, July 16 NYT crossword puzzle on video, successfully solving 72% of the grid without any aid. This was my best performance yet.
Reviewing the video, it’s fascinating to see how my momentum shifts throughout the solve. During parts of the solve, I find significant momentum and many answers fall quickly into place. At other points in the solve, I reach a near standstill.
In the past week, these standstills have been my biggest mental vulnerability: It’s easy to give up on the puzzle in these moments.
Therefore, it’s important that I specifically focus my training on overcoming these points of low momentum, and maintaining the necessary mindset.
These low-momentum moments happen at two main points during the solve: 1. At the very beginning, and 2. Towards the middle, once I’ve juiced the puzzle for as many squares as I think I can.
In the past week, I was having noticeable trouble getting past #1. However, after my confidence boost from yesterday’s solve, this doesn’t seem like it’s as big of an issue anymore (at least during today’s solves).
So, over the next few days, I’ll focus my training on #2: How do I push forward once I’m at the point where it feels like I have no more leads into the empty parts of the grid?
In the video, because it was on video, I had the extra motivation to push myself a bit harder than normal, which forced me to improvise and find a decent solution to this problem…
Basically, once I got “stuck”, I started making a series of low-probability guesses, almost exclusively based on letter statistics and nothing else (i.e. “Based on the surrounding filled-in squares, what letter is most likely to be in this empty square?”).
After filling in a handful of squares in this fashion, my brain was then challenged to justify these guesses against the corresponding clues. Occasionally, I would see something that actually made sense, unlocking a few more letters.
Then, I would erase the dead-end guesses, try to proceed with the puzzle, and, once I got stuck again, revert back to more letter-based guesses.
This Expanding & Contracting approach seems to be the best way to overcome a loss in momentum. In fact, in many cases, all I’ve needed was one more letter to unlock sizable areas of the puzzle.
Thus, it seems important that I train my letter statistics abilities in a more deliberate fashion (so I can optimally apply this Expanding & Contracting approach).
Perhaps, I can build another computer program…
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
