Quotes About Problem-solving

Asking "What else can I do?" is the very essence of taking accountability and is the Solve It question. It's all about your ability to engage personally, and deeply, with what you can and should be doing, despite the gravitational tug from all the reasons/excuses that can drag you down Below The Line.

Be hard on the problem, soft on the people.

The participants should come to see themselves as working side by side, attacking the problem, not each other. Hence the first proposition: Separate the people from the problem.

Recast an attack on you as an attack on the problem.

Break the vicious cycle by refusing to react. Instead of pushing back, sidestep their attack and deflect it against the problem. As in the Oriental martial arts of judo and jujitsu, avoid pitting your strength against theirs directly; instead, use your skill to step aside and turn their strength to your ends. Rather than resisting their force, channel it into exploring interests, inventing options for mutual gain, and searching for independent standards.

Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

If we have done anything wrong," said Pierpont, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up.

He always found a simple, easy way to reach the correct answer.

He believed that anything could be reverse-engineered. If one human or group of humans put something together, then another human or group of humans could take it apart again. It was a basic principle. All that was required was empathy and thought and imagination. And he liked pressure. He liked deadlines. He liked a short and finite time to crack a problem. He liked a quiet space to work in. And he liked a similar mind to work with.

The big guys like Google weren't always big. Once they were two kids in a garage. Or a dorm room. Some of them set out to be billionaires from the get-go, but some of them didn't. Some of them got just caught up in solving an interesting problem, which happened to be worth billions later.

I hadn't figured that out yet. When you're stuck with a plan full of holes, more have a habit of appearing.

Personas inteligentes que trabajen duro, presten atención y sean capaces de pensar de modo diferente.

Don't worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right.

Smart people, working hard, paying attention, thinking laterally.

You found a pen?" "No, but I have a can of Cheez Whiz. I'll write your number on the counter with it, then find a pen and copy it.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.

Mathematics is not a spectator sport!

Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.

If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.