The Importance Of Problem Solving!

We tend to assume that mental growth belongs to childhood, something that winds down once a person reaches adulthood. It doesn't. Cognitive development keeps going through our adult years, and a good chunk of it rests on two things: how creative we are and how much we've actually learned about working through problems. There is an old line from a King and I song, roughly "Do it my way, but nicely," and it captures how plenty of parents and bosses operate. Which raises an uncomfortable question. When a supervisor or a parent runs everything that way, maybe the person whose problem-solving is underdeveloped isn't only the child or the employee.

Any decent working relationship has two sides pulling their weight. A capable boss needs a good employee. A capable parent is matched with a child whose potential hasn't been tapped yet. A good teacher needs a student who actually wants to learn. In every one of those pairings, the person leading and the person being led both have to show up and contribute something.

So how do we move that along? Mostly by refusing to let "I can't do this" shut the door before anyone tries. Learning doesn't stop at 16, or 21, or 35. It runs the length of a life. I'll admit my own pattern here: faced with some obstacle, I often won't give it the time it needs. I'd rather push past the snag than sit with it, so I leave the detail unhandled and lean on somebody else to cover what I never taught myself. No wrestling with the thing, no mastering the new skill.

Barriers and roadblocks are really chances to grow and pick up something you didn't have before. Think about how many times you've said "I can't" when the truth was closer to "I haven't yet." Depending on other people to do the things we never learned has a cost. It breeds anger, both at ourselves for being stuck and at the people whose moods and schedules we end up at the mercy of.

Pick a project. Find one thing you've always handed off to someone else, and learn to do it yourself. My spouse recently walked me through, for the umpteenth time, how to pull up a missed number on the phone. I'd always made him do it. When he wasn't around I'd get furious, partly at myself for not knowing and partly at him, as if his knowing and my not knowing put him in charge of whether I could return a phone call.

These days I keep a running list of things I ought to be able to manage on my own, items I used to wave off with a limp "I can't." It isn't always easy. But once you've got one of them down, it hands you a kind of freedom: now you can do it your way instead of waiting on theirs.

Learning runs on the back-and-forth between student and teacher. The learner has to build on what they already know to close the distance between themselves and whatever the teacher is offering, and it's that shared ground that makes learning happen. The attitude "This is so stupid, why can't he get it" usually says more about a teacher who has quit and shoved the blame onto the student.

One more thing. After you've cracked a problem, actually use what you figured out the next time it shows up. Practice does its work. And what you teach yourself tends to stick best, because you don't skip steps or leave terms undefined. The brain's capacity to keep rewiring, its neuroplasticity, is exactly why we can go on learning for the rest of our lives. That kind of ongoing learning lifts self-esteem. It builds up skills you might pass on to someone else down the line. It widens the room you get to live in, so you stop telling yourself, "I won't go there, because I can't do that, and I'm not willing to learn."

You can often choose what you want to learn to do. What you can't do is control other people into doing things for you whenever you'd rather not know how yourself.

Related