Turn the puzzle upside down
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time grappling with a complex, ill-defined problem. However I looked at the situation pondering what my options were, I realised that I can’t see a simple, clear path that would feel right.
I realised that I needed to shift my perspective. I felt I was like a two-dimensional man in a three-dimensional world — unable to understand how the world works if I can’t look at things from different angles.
I asked a colleague of mine to help me by asking questions I haven’t considered yet to help me see the situation from a different angle. I felt like I was looking at this image unable to break free from the 16, 06, 68, 88, X, 98 sequence in my head, wishing for someone to ask me whether I tried turning the image upside down.
It reminded me of a conversation I recently had with someone else. I felt like my interlocutor would benefit from looking at the situation from a different perspective, asking a different set of questions, but we kept coming back to the original set of assumptions that didn’t leave much space for manoeuvring. As if the person was saying “if I turn this picture upside down, it’ll be harder for me to see the 16, 06, 68, 88, X, 98 sequence, why do it?”.
Ultimately, the most interesting breakthroughs that allow us to grow and learn new things happen when we let go of the previous frame of reference and allow for things to make no sense for a while. This is scary because we really, really want things to make sense. We want to have an explanation. We want to live in the world in which things have an explanation. It’s scary when they don’t. It’s really tempting to fit the events into our worldview instead of challenging the assumptions we hold close to our heart.
Yet, to grow and learn, we sometimes need to go through the journey of transformation — be it small and inconsequential like turning a puzzle upside down or big like an identity crisis — that will make no sense for a while before it starts making sense again.
Turning the puzzle upside down is scary because you already know it’ll be harder to read and analyse the 16, 06, 68, 88, X, 98 sequence, especially when you can’t see 86, X, 88, 89, 90, 91 yet. Yet, sometimes it makes sense to do things that make no sense at all.
