Navigating Authentic Problem-Solving: From Forced Solutions to Genuine Impact
Breaking the Mold: Your Journey to Authentic Problem-Solving Mastery
Yes, this might sound like an issue that I’m imposing on you, but for startups running out of business or people losing out on the charm of their lives, the blame can easily be awarded to the problem of shoving a piece of solution into a problem and then accepting its nature to be what you forcefully created yourself.
An unwanted, forced match.
The Universe’s Preference for Natural Progression
The universe likes things to happen naturally — any discovery, any incident, and even an epidemic—nothing can be predicted (because to predict we need to know every teeny tiny bit of the detail of the present state you are in, which is well, impossible), and things that can’t be predicted are the things whose course of action cannot be controlled, and nature loves this system, which needs to be in place always. Imagine we are living in a simulation controlled by some kid using his computer. One thing we can be sure of is that the kid would want his system use the least amount of energy, although this is just a far-fetched shot at explaining why physics always coincides to a point where the goal turns out to be, directly or indirectly, lesser consumption of energy. Now why should you listen to me type out random BS? It makes sense when we accept the fact that things will take the direction they are supposed to, one way or another. You can play with the variables as much as you want. If you try to fake the initial conditions, i.e., create a solution first and then look for a problem, then it’ll be sure that this forced match is annihilated, sooner or later.
Embracing Individual Journeys
You have watched a lot of billionaires seize their spot at the top just because they went through a specific timeline, which is getting highlighted by the media (sometimes by themselves). Who doesn’t want distribution generated by personal brands today, eh?) without the nitty-gritty details of what preconditions were in place. You are obsessed with looking at their career trajectory, and to mimic the output, you try to go hand-in-hand with the same structure they followed.
Sadly, things don’t work the same for everyone. You are blind enough to follow through anyway. which, to some extent, will get you small bags of goodies until you try to replicate their big break.
Big breaks usually have 2–3 segments, and the biggest block of the pie is owned by something we all love and hate at the same time: luck.
You can’t replicate someone’s luck. Luck’s out of the picture, but let’s go on. Most billionaires are entrepreneurs, and to achieve the output of becoming a billionaire, you choose the path of entrepreneurship even though you’re not sure that you’ll like this domain. Still, the problem is small; there are possibilities that you’ll like it once you’re in, but the elephant in the room is that you try to match their speed of achieving success as well.
The Temptation of Imitation
You sit, think of a solution that sounds cool enough to be forecasted in your head, and you see how you are turning into the person that you wanted to be. It’s a good feeling. It’s addictive. You feel like you already have it in your hands, although you haven’t even moved an inch away from your bed.
This is when you look for a problem that has not been assessed and match it with your solution. Builders don’t build for the public good; they build it just to satiate their weird need to test something, and in that process, history is created by accident. Penicillin was discovered by accident when Dr. Alexander Fleming was out looking for something else.
This sounds fine; creating history is a good objective, even by accident, right? But the caveat is that you lack the passion as well because this is not a self-actualized career but a second-hand hope to become someone else.
Personal Reflection: A Journey of Self-Discovery
To put things into perspective, I’m writing this because I’ve been doing this myself on a different scale altogether.
BackStory — I loved how you can build a piece of tech with a small team that can affect millions and billions. I wanted a piece of this. How did I get into this? I opened my notepad, wrote a list of 97 startup ideas, and boom, here’s the list of solutions looking for an apparently burning problem, which should have been an optimized solution to a problem and not the other way around.
Firstly, listing down startup ideas is progressively being adopted by wannabe founders, and it’s not the cleanest way to build a company that sustains. Sure, you can convince five people to fund your startup because you drilled through CrunchBase and inferred that AI companies are being heavily funded, and you went on with it.
I never succeeded with this bogus list of startup ideas, and neither did the companies that started because they were second in line, with little to no innovation. They are not filling gaps; they are imaging potholes that either don’t exist or don't exist at that time. To add to the latter part, one of the TED talks I saw nicely explained that apart from execution, idea, and team, everything is important, but timing the market is also standing up with all of these biggies. Uber wouldn’t have been that successful if 3G cellular networks hadn’t been launched. The same is true for the companies that were born out of the 2008 financial crisis.
Synonymous everywhere
So, yeah, you might be doing this similar practice in your daily life too. How? You choose to be someone based on what you want to be, or worse, who you want to be. We have different cores (genetic settings), and with this as the starting point, it’s nearly impossible to live someone else’s life. We learn to play football because we want to be like Ronaldo (or get the fame and wealth he has). Don’t get me wrong, we can have idols, but there is something bigger and higher on the priority list than just wanting to be someone. Your solution (Ronaldo) shouldn’t make you want to play football (the problem).
This can be seen in multiple places, and it can be grown out of literally everywhere, your house, media, and friends. It’s tough to get past this and keep our principle values original and intact.
The Power of Authentic Passion: Fueling Success
There’s no simple action or answer to this problem, which, once addressed, gets easily noticed in every decision you make. But, as a starter, we have to take care that no matter what the situation is, we have to choose our paths after being 100% sure that there is no external influence on them. If we are sure that in a closed room where no one will know about your success whatsoever, you are awarded success, you would still be happy. Answer this question alone, put our minds to work, and decide if we really like what we are doing or if is it a mismatch made forcefully by our need to replicate someone else’s personality or success, which feels amazing from our POV without having any idea about the dirt we are going to step in.
It comes down to choosing what your principal values are, keeping them intact, and using them as the only source of advice to guide your decisions for or against the choices you make. It will make your life guilt-free, and you can own it like a boss.
