Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Idea
& Thinking:
Problem-Solving
-
- "... the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid ...
will never
- sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well;
but
- also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
Mark Twain
- Stanley Kubrick: “If you can
talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been
mastered.”
- Albert Einstein: "Problems
cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them... We cannot
solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
- Carl Jung: "The greatest and
most important problems in life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can
never be solved, but only outgrown."
- Barbara Colorose: "If you can't solve it, it's not
a problem--it's reality."
- Brand Blanchard: "[How to think about a problem:] The first
step is to make the problem specific... The second step is to form theories freely of how
to rid yourself of that burden... The third step is to develop in foresight the
consequences of your proposals... The fourth and final step in thinking is to compare the
consequences of your proposals to see which is best in the light of your scheme of
life as a whole... Whether you choose a vacation or a spouse, a party or a candidate,
a cause to contribute to or a creed to live by -- think!"
- Voltaire: "No problem can
stand the assault of sustained thinking."
- Stanley Arnold: "Every problem contains within itself the
seeds of its own solution.--
- H.L. Mencken: "For every complex problem, there is a
solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
- G. K. Chesterton: "It isn't that they can't see the
solution. It's that they can't see the problem."
- John F. Kennedy: "Let us not seek the Republican answer or
the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the
past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future."
- Albert Einstein: "The mere formulation of a problem is far
more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or
experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems
from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science."
- John F. Kennedy, American University, June 10, 1963: "Our
problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he
wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."
- Jim Rohn: "To solve any problem, here are three questions
to ask yourself: First, what could I do? Second, what could I read? And third, who could I
ask?"
- R. Buckminster Fuller: "When I'm working on a problem, I
never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished,
if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."
Zeeman, E. Christopher, Catastrophe Theory,
1977: "Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery
of simplicity."
- Ramona E. F. Arnett: "The perception of a
problem is always relative. Your headache feels terrific to the druggist."
- Malcolm Forbes: "It's so
much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about the problem."
- John Galsworthy: "Idealism
increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem."
- Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing
in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more
common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is
almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has
solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
- Richard Sloma: "Never try to solve all the problems at once
-- make them line up for you, one-by-one."
- Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.: "Do it,
fix it, try it, is our favorite axiom... 'chaotic' action is preferable to orderly
inaction... The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in the excellent
companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment."
- Warren Bennis, New York Times, 2/17/02: "Unlike top
management at Enron, exemplary leaders reward dissent. They encourage it. They understand
that, whatever momentary discomfort they experience as a result of being told they might
be wrong, it is more than offset by the fact that the information will help them make
better decisions."
- Phyllis Bottome: "There are two ways of meeting
difficulties: You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them."
- Roger Lewin: "Too often we give our children answers to
remember rather than problems to solve."
- George F. Nordenbolt: "No
matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step
toward a solution. Do something."
- Editor's note: John Kennedy, and
others, noted that problems created by man can be undone by the same; however, as many
thinkers note, there is a class of "problems" which defy solution, the kind of
which represents the nature of this life: as Barbara Colorose put it, "If you
can't solve it, it's not a problem -- it's reality."
In other words, a thought borrowed from other disciplines, this mortal life, for our
long-term good, was meant to introduce us to a certain amount of discomfiture and no
amount of "problem-solving" ability will allow us to escape that reality; this
is not to say, even within this metaphysical context, that the effects of suffering and
related "problems" cannot be mitigated. This latter notion seems to somewhat
contradict my earlier assertion, but, as they say, "I never said it would be
easy."
- Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, The AfterLife Experiments:
"How can you prove to anyone that you love your husband or wife, a child, a
friend, a pet? Not by what you say--people often lie to protect themselves or
others. Not by what you do--we all do some things because they're expected of us
rather than because we truly want to do them... there is no substitute for having the
experience of love--or, for that matter, any other experience. One must ultimately have
the experience for oneself. Everything else is indirect--a process of inference, of
interpretation. But the deep question arises, how do we know whether the
interpretation of our personal experiences is genuine? ... it's difficult to
determine whether what we interpret to be love is actually love... Fortunately, just
because something is difficult doesn't make it impossible... Scientific exploration begins
by forming a hypothesis, and then gathering evidence that will support it or will prove it
false. We started with the hypothesis, the working assumption, that science can establish
that love exists, that consciousness exists, and that survival of consciousness exists, in
the same way that science has established that gravity exists, that electrons exist, and
that photons from 'deceased' stars continue to exist... Physics teaches us that
it's scientifically appropriate to infer the existence of invisible processes through
careful observation in repeated experiments. Just as we scientifically infer the
existence of an invisible force termed gravity through the systematic and careful
observations of objects falling to the ground, our hypothesis said that one can
scientifically infer the existence of invisible living info-energy systems -- living souls
and spirits -- through systematic and careful experimentation."
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