No Unlikely Solutions

As Creatives and problem solvers, it is easy to be diluted by the sense that the answer to every problem lies within ourselves or at arms reach. Especially with the internet providing seemingly endless opportunities for inspiration. If you don’t find the answer you’re looking for through sketching, the next step is almost always to grab a keyboard and google relevant topics to find a spark. While not discounting the value of the internet as a means for inspiration, I want to take this post to focus on another source of inspiration I have found particularly helpful in my creative process recently. People. Working alongside great minds is infinitely beneficial while engaged in problem solving, and I am lucky enough to work with extremely talented individuals on a daily basis, however these are not the people I mean. The people who have proved most invaluable in my process over the last few week have been outsiders. People who may have no background in design or tech, and definitely have not spent hours mulling over the problem at hand in there heads. These people, wether they know it or not, and wether you recognize it or not, may help lead you to the answer you’ve been looking. If not the answer you’ve been looking for, they might reveal a solution that you might not have looked for at all.

It was noon on a sunny and 70 degree Denver day, and I’d spent all morning inside trying to figure out what the hell I had done wrong. I’d spent the previous two days building a site I was really proud of, only to find it didn’t render correctly on Chrome. There was no reason it shouldn’t have been working. It rendered fine on all browsers from my local connection. I searched the internet for reasons this could be happening, double checked my code, posted my problem to stack overflow…..all my usual outlets for code confusion and frustration. No luck. I asked some of my peers at BDW to take a look at my code and try and figure out the issue, while several solutions were offered and tried out, the problem persisted and my frustration grew. So there I was, wasting away a beautiful Sunday afternoon, lost, with no hope in sight. After trying the same solutions over and over, I was stumped, frustrated, and ready to punch a wall. Instead I decided to step away and go play a round of golf with a few buddies. After a few holes of shooting the shit (and playing like shit), one of my friends asked me how many hours it took me to write the code compared to how many hours I had spent trying to debug it. This had not really occurred to me, but I could have rebuilt the site several times over from scratch in the amount of time I had taken trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Starting over was not the solution I had been searching for, and certainly was not an attractive solution as someone who likes to think of themselves as a problem solver. In fact it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to ditch my code and start over. Nevertheless, I went home that night and rebuilt the site, testing the code on each browser as I went. Sure enough, in a single evening I had fixed my issue by simply starting over from scratch. The developers amongst you might be disappointed with this answer, since there must have been a fixable problem within my original code, but this is beside the point. I saved myself a great deal of time and frustration by leaving the mind of a problem solver and developers and getting into the brain of an outsider.

This is just the latest example of an outside perspective leading to a successful solution that wouldn’t have come from myself or my peers. It wasn’t the prettiest solution and maybe not the prettiest example in terms of problem solving, but it nicely illustrates the point I set out to make. Never discount the value of an outside perspective. Sometimes the simplest solutions are buried under a layer of ego and involvement, don’t let this happen. Get outside and talk to people who think differently. Stepping away from the problem and getting outside may help by itself, but it isn’t the be all end all. Always be talking about the problems you are trying to solve and always be listening to what others have to say about them. You may uncover a simple solution in a place you never would have looked by yourself. There are no unlikely places to find a spark to your creativity, only places you have neglected to look for.