TLDR
Resourcefulness is a function of your self-perception and personality.
You can (possibly) acquire a resourcefulness habit through a series of microhabits. Some specific solutions for that include: Headspace meditation app, Machine Learning courses, “roguelike” computer games.
Table of Contents
- A Completely Unnecessary Intro
- The binary ways of the brain
- The battlefields of resourcefulness
- The tools
- Conclusion
A Completely Unnecessary Intro
I recently went to a school reunion and ran into my former Maths teacher. Predictably, old Mr Walrus didn’t waste even a minute. He leapt straight into his interrogation mode and finally concluded, in a dismissive tone of mild surprise:
“I’m glad you found something you are able to do in life”.
Then he pointed to a guy from my year and said:
“But you know, Simon has a properly wonderful career. I always say he’s a genius. So, have you thought about getting married? It’s time for you to have kids soon” (read: you’re probably mostly only good for breeding).
Er, sure thing Professor. Good talk.
Now, the Walrus has always been a rather controversial pedagogue. However, he did have a nice saying about solving problems (usually served in a bumper pack together with a reflection on my intellectual indolence):
“(As our little Mr Obi well knows), it’s better to solve one exercise in a thousand ways, than a thousand exercises — in one.”
And with that, he was dead on.
Let’s take a small detour.
The binary ways of the brain
Our brains seem to like to think in binary ways.
This is actually not so bad, since throughout the day we need to make dozens of “yes-or-no” decisions: eat porridge for breakfast or not, put on a hat or expose your haircut to the elements, get off at bus stop A (closer to work, but shabby area) or B (bit further, but a nice walk), et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
If we had to analyze the full tree of our possibilities and values, consequences and preferences each time we made a decision, we would go bananas. It’s nice to be able to make a split-second yes-or-no call sometimes.
But often this adaptation will spill over into more valuable areas of our lives. Work, relationships, spirituality. Having such knee-jerk kind of reactions in those areas is not cool.
Why? Because it kills resourcefulness. It kills creativity. It kills adaptability and compassion. It kills what really makes us awesome as humans.
Surely you know people in your life who are very rigid thinkers. They’re often stubborn, prickly, unwilling to discuss things, and the very thought of having to deal with them makes your skin crawl. You go to them, and most likely you’ll hear the word “No”, dripping with palpable, tired anxiety.
And surely you also know people around whom you can feel relaxed, who are accepting and thoughtful even if you say something stupid. These people will try to understand the point you’re making, and the very fact of dealing with them gives you confidence the problem you’re both discussing will get solved.
You probably also have people at your work who just can’t seem to find solutions on their own. They’re always asking others for help, getting irritated at the task at hand, and desperately trying to show they’re good for it.
And there are also likely people at your work who you know will solve anything you throw at them. They have a magical ability to cut through stuff and will often help others, on top of their own workload.
Not to be patronising, but let’s just check: which type of people would you want as your employees? Your friends? Hell, even your life partners?
Of course, the second type — the resourceful, openminded chick/dude/person.
Now, for my old teacher Mr Walrus, the only measure of success in life was getting good at Maths.
The only fruit worthy of tickling with his moustache — the apple.
The only type of material worthy of being turned into a jacket — worn-out suede.
And the only opinion worth considering — his own. He is an example of a rigid, binary, unilateral thinker. And, as you may have noticed, a rather abrasive conversationalist (d*** wasn’t an acceptable shorthand, according to my reviewer).
Now, the problem is: he has internalized the above behaviours and beliefs to an extreme extent. He doesn’t discuss them, or question them. They’re part of his personality. They fire automatically.
“I like apples.”
“Without mathematics, you will not get far in life.”
There’s no arguing with this guy. You can’t argue against dogmas. There’s no point.
So how do you avoid becoming that kind of person? Well, it seems like you essentially need to change your beliefs about yourself.
If we assume that your brain is reasonably malleable and your personality isn’t set in stone, those positive traits of creativity, grit and openness can surely be cultivated through regular practice.
We could even wager saying:
Resourcefulness is a habit.
How do you cultivate a habit of resourcefulness and openness, and make it become your default mode?
The answer to this question is complex. A crucial piece of the puzzle here is probably the following quote from James Clear:
Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.¹
With that in mind, let’s say there are two aspects to creating a resourcefulness habit:
• the overall battlefields where your work is going to play out and
• the specific things you can do to score some guaranteed improvement.
The battlefields of resourcefulness
Your nerves
It can be reasonably said that anxiety and fear can limit your thinking. It not only physically affects your short term memory, ability to learn and other cognitive functions — it boxes you into simplistic thought patterns. Namely?
You get a difficult task at work. If it scares you, soon you’ll be going:
“Ah, shit. Shit, shit, shit shit. I just don’t know what to do. I’ll just try to do something. Maybe try to make someone guide me through it. Pretend like I didn’t know any better. I want to outcome to happen now. Boss will be angry. I’ll look stupid. Outcome. Outcome, please. Now…”
You’ve likely seen that kind of behaviour, either in yourself or in others.
It takes a certain openness of mind in that moment to realize (or remember) that:
- you’ve actually worked on something similar before
- it’s alright to ask stupid questions if they help solve the problem
- there are ways to get more information or make your task easier
- a simple change of environment could help you focus
It’s hard to imagine Alexander the Great or George Patton winning any of their famous, creative victories while thinking:
“Ah shit, I’m about to do battle. Shit, shit, shit. I know, I’ll just send my strongest soldiers forward right now and, uh, maybe they’ll win. Avanti! [or whatever Greeks shout when they charge an enemy]”.
A perceptive, relaxed mind will think in a different way:
“Ah, this Persian army sure looks tired after a long march. And look, there’s no shade within a mile around and the sun is up. Most likely they’ll have to attack soon. I’ll just set some traps in front of our lines and wait right here. Judging by their distance from us, we’ve got about 3 hours.”
Pretty resourceful, right?
The people around you
There’s an external aspect to your resourcefulness. Carefully evaluating the culture of a company your joining, carefully assessing the way your friends talk and behave can really help with it. It’s hard to build a habit of being collected and creative if you’re fighting an uphill battle against the environment.
If you live among stressed, rigid thinkers, you will most likely become a stressed, rigid thinker yourself (at least temporarily). I’ve worked through it with some of my friends, and my first three workplaces in Berlin.
The people around you are an extremely important part of the soup you’re soaking in on a daily basis and influence you massively, whether you like it or not. Which is emphasised by the habit expert James Clear in his book Atomic Habits:
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour. […] If you’re surrounded by jazz lovers, you’re more likely to believe it’s reasonable to play jazz every day.¹
He also emphasises the role of generally structuring your environment in ways that help habit building:
One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design. […] you can optimize your environment to make actions easier.¹
Which sets the stage for our next battlefield.
Your problem-solving structure
Our short-term memories suck. Research has shown that we can essentially hold only a couple pieces of information (say 4)² at any given time. That’s pathetic. At least for a computer.
By adding structure to the way you work and think, you can offload the gigantic effort of juggling information and let your brain switch out of the tight mental loops it would otherwise be circling.
A great example of that is the Ultraworking spreadsheet, designed by the author and businessman Sebastian Marshall and his colleagues. Using this tool to structure and prepare my work session usually allows me to discover false assumptions and missing information and go back exactly to where I left off in my thought process (if I get distracted). This certainly opens up tons of room for creativity.
² If you want to learn where this number came from, be sure to check out Barbara’s Oakley excellent book on learning, A Mind for Numbers.
Your assertiveness and self-esteem
Nathaniel Branden, a long-time researcher on self-esteem, defines it as “the experience that we are appropriate to life and to the requirements of life […] confidence in our ability to think, confidence in our ability to cope with the basic challenges of life”.³
I guess you could also phrase it as: “the experience of being equal to the challenges of life, the belief that we’re able to overcome those challenges”. Why are we talking about self-esteem though?
Well, it’s because those cool, open people whom we depicted several paragraphs earlier all very likely have a certain amount of healthy self-esteem.
They know that they have it in them – not only to survive, but also to help others thrive. And that makes for spacious, interested and interesting minds.
Somehow, having that conviction about yourself frees you up from mental cycles of guilt, dependence and self-limitation. Allowing yourself to think in less constrained ways can definitely help boost your ability to solve the problems in your life.
Quick summary
So these are the daily battlefields on which your creativity will either wax or wane:
- your emotional stability
- your self-esteem
- your social circle
- your way of approaching problems
These are some of the areas where you’ll (presumably) want to create some highly sticky habits to help improve your resourcefulness.
The tools
The multidimensionality of our lives often means there are countless, often surprising ways of getting where you want to get. Just being able to bodily, intuitively recognise that fact takes training. And it also takes a while to build a habit of being resourceful.
It’s a pretty big habit to task yourself to create. It might be easier if you instead focus on introducing, easier, more manageable “micro-habits” into your life.
Here are 5 concrete tools that helped me make different aspects of resourcefulness “stick” and helped me grow a “gut understanding” of what it actually is.
Meditation
I found the ‘Creativity’ pack on the popular mobile meditation app Headspace to be extremely helpful for growing my resourcefulness.
Do you know that “Oh shit!/Eureka!” feeling you get when you think of something clever in the shower, or while taking a walk, or washing the dishes?
This concrete Headspace pack teaches you to take that feeling, familiarise yourself with it and then try to summon it almost at will in your day-to-day life.
A nice side effect of this is being able to get out of the cycle of self-obsessed thoughts and start seeing the world as involving other people — their decisions, needs, feelings. It really changes the way you understand the environment around you. You’re suddenly taking in much more of it.
Another useful fact is that Headspace have done quite a good job of gamifying their product – which definitely helps with habit building. One less thing for you to worry about.
AI algorithms/Deep Learning/Statistics
All these three disciplines teach you about statistical thinking, which is often a great antidote for unilateral, “binary” thinking. It can help you create very useful mental models and make your brain a bit more flexible in the way it processes things around you. Once you’ve spent some time studying data, it starts to seem absurd to jump to conclusions the way we sometimes do. Example:
Your colleague gives you a grumpy look?
Binary thinking: they’re mad at me – happy face means “friendly”, grumpy face means “hostile”.
Statistical thinking: there’s a thousand reasons they may be looking sad. I should probably ask what’s wrong.
Again, if you need a concrete tool, I found Udacity’s Deep Learning and AI courses very useful in that regard. Also, anything by Andrew Ng and Geoffrey Hinton on Coursera is a real intellectual treat.
Difficult computer games
These can teach you a lot about life. Games directed at a typical user only require you to click faster or minimally engage your creativity. They make your thinking lazy and simplistic. They hook you up to a steady, mad, primal cycle of dopamine highs and lows.
In Roguelike games, if you do not engage your creativity, you die. If you try to hack and slash through challenges, you die. If you don’t stop and take in the whole scene, you’ll miss something and you’ll die. It can be incredibly frustrating at the beginning, but soon you learn to see opportunities and solutions in your environment. (And then you die some more).
I can’t speak for other professions, but this translates extremely well into creativity in programming. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve run to my colleagues for help, only to realize I should’ve just taken a deep breath and asked myself some simple questions in order to solve the problem. Instead my mind went into a “caveman mode” and tried to club the problem to death.
If you’d like to know more about this topic, check out the book Roguelike, by Sebastian Marshall, or straight up play Tales of Maj’Eyal (I dare you to finish it).
Building skills
In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the happiest people are those who pursue mastery of a skill.⁴ And it’s probably doubly true if you’re a beginner in your field, struggling to build a career. The stress of being underskilled is enormous, especially if your livelihood depends on it. By building valuable skills quickly (another book recommendation: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport), you can release some of that stress, and also give yourself options to join better companies, with more humane cultures and nicer people around.
Which means more creative thinkers around you.
And you have the added benefit of understanding what it’s like to get good at something.
Reading
It seems obvious, but just realizing how much other (clever) people’s thoughts can differ from yours can rub out a great deal of rigidity from your thinking. Books give your unconscious mind something to chew on, and allow it to make the incredible connections it sometimes comes up with when your not even actively thinking about a problem.
If you’re a software developer, you may want to check out exercism.io. Reading other people’s code and comparing it with yours can give you tons of intuition in a very short space of time.
Conclusion
You can increase your creativity if you work on improving its component parts. There are tools out there that can give you a boost, and help you build various microhabits that directly influence your creativity.
If you have any thoughts or tricks of your own, do us a favour and share them below!
And, as always, in the name of mental hygiene, bear in mind that what I wrote here is extremely subjective and phenomenological.
Thanks for reading
Obi
[1]: James Clear. Atomic Habits.
[2]: Barbara Oakley. A Mind for Numbers. Section: Introduction to Working and Long-Term Memory.
[3]: Nathaniel Branden. The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem.
[4]: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. From Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:
On the job people feel skillful and challenged, and therefore feel more happy, strong, creative, and satisfied. […] Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times — although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
