Quotes About Problem-solving

Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 "When all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways.

Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.

progress is an outcome not of magic but of problem-solving.

The goals installed in Homo sapiens, that problem-solving, social species, are not just the Four Fs. High on the list are understanding the environment and securing the cooperation of others.

Not every problem is a crisis, a plague, or an epidemic, and among the things that happen in the world is that people solve the problems confronting them.

Finally, an intensifying application of knowledge and rationality to human affairs - the escalator of reason - can force people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, to ramp down the privileging of their own interests over others', and to re-frame violence as a problem to be solved rather than a contest to be won.

Women are often intent on formulating the problem when they are discussing something, and they need to be listened to—even questioned—to help ensure clarity in the formulation. Then, whatever problem is left, if any, can be helpfully solved. (It should also be noted first that too-early problem-solving may also merely indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation.)

What is it that is bothering me?" "Is that something I could fix?" and "Would I actually be willing to fix it?

If there is a problem to be solved, and many people involve themselves in the solution, then a hierarchy must and will arise, as those who can do, and those who cannot follow as best they can, often learning to be competent in the process. If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

Have some humility. Clean up your bedroom. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it. When you can do all that, find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you dare. If that works, too, move on to even more ambitious projects. And, as the necessary beginning to that process . . . abandon ideology.

before a problem can be solved it must be formulated precisely.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution,

A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.

Dividing one number by another is mere computation ; knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.

Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means.

Mathematics is not just a sequence of computations to be carried out by rote until your patience or stamina runs out—although it might seem that way from what you've been taught in courses called mathematics.

basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.

Often people think of developments in computation as arising when we make our computers more blazingly fast, so they can compute more stuff , bigger data . It's actually just as important to prune away big parts of the data that aren't relevant to the problem at hand! The fastest computation is the one you don't do.

Cuando esté en un callejón sin salida, salga por donde entró".

in the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

As I was saying, there's no point in both of us getting stuck in there.

The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take in the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it.