# Psychology of Problem Solving: 10 Strategies To Live Your Life On Easy Mode

Channel: PsychToons
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ad72y7HTQ
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 2934
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/i_ad72y7HTQ

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[0:00] Look closely at anyone whose life seems to run on easy mode, and you'll notice something that doesn't add up. Their problems aren't smaller than yours. They get sick, they get dumped, their projects collapse, their money runs out. The difference isn't the size of what lands on them, and the assumption almost everyone makes about this is wrong. We assume the psychology of problem-solving comes down to horsepower, that some people are simply faster, sharper, born able to think clearly under pressure, and the rest of us just have to try harder. So, the advice you get is always the same: slow down and think it through. Weigh the pros and cons. Be

[0:31] more logical, more disciplined, more strategic. You've heard every version of it. And if that advice actually worked, you'd have solved most of your life by now. But, here's what's really happening. Your thinking isn't weak, it's just aimed at the wrong thing. You pour almost all of it into finding the answer, and almost none of it into deciding what the problem is. And difficulty, it turns out, is not a fixed property of your problems. It's a setting, a dial, and the dial gets turned before you start solving by how the problem was stated in the first

[0:59] place. Easy mode is not a smarter brain. It's a brain working on a better stated problem. Welcome back to Psych2Go. Today, we're breaking down the psychology of problem-solving, and 10 strategies that quietly move your life from hard mode to easy mode. Not by making you smarter, but by changing the setting before you ever start thinking. Let's start with what separates the two kinds of people. In 1976, two psychologists, Jacob Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published a study of art students that should be far more famous than it is. They gave each student a table of objects and an hour to produce a drawing. Simple enough, but they weren't really watching the

[1:37] drawings. They were watching the first 10 minutes. Roughly half the students moved fast. They picked a few objects, arranged them the obvious way, and got to work. They knew what they were making before they started. The other half did something that looked like wasting time. They picked objects up, turned them over, put them down, swapped them, rearranged the the table, started and erased, and started again. Some were still fiddling 40 minutes in. When independent critics judged the finished work, the second group's drawings were rated more original. And when the researchers came back years later to see who was still working as an artist and who had succeeded, the same group was

[2:12] ahead. The researchers gave that behavior a name, problem finding. I'll be straight with you about the evidence. This was a small study, around 30 students, with follow-ups that lost people along the way. It isn't a law of nature, but it names something you can verify in your own life this week because the two groups still exist, and

[2:29] you already know which one you're in. One group treats the problem as given and races to the answer. The other treats the problem as the thing to be built and only then answers it. So, why is the first group so much bigger? Why does almost everyone sprint to the answer? Because of something called the Einstellung effect, and it's more unsettling than it sounds. Researchers Merim Bilalic, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet set chess players puzzles that contained two solutions. One familiar and decent. One unfamiliar and much better. Most players found the familiar one and stopped there. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part is what happened next. The researchers

[3:10] tracked the players' eyes while they insisted sincerely that they were still searching for something better. Their eyes never left the squares belonging to the solution they'd already found. They weren't lazy. They weren't stubborn. They genuinely believed they were still looking. And their attention had already quietly closed the search. That's your mind on almost every problem you have. The first workable idea

[3:32] doesn't just arrive. It takes the wheel. It decides what counts as relevant, what you notice, what you go looking for. And you experience all of that as open-minded thinking, which is why the fix is not to think harder. You can't order your attention to stop favoring the answer it already has, the same way you can't decide to stop recognizing a song you've heard a thousand times. So, none of the 10 strategies you're about to hear are think harder. Every one of them is a change to the conditions before the thinking starts. Strategy one, spend your time on the problem, not the answer. You decide you hate your

[4:07] job. Within 4 days, you're rewriting your CV. Notice what just happened. In the space of an afternoon, a vague, complicated situation got converted into one specific question, how do I get hired somewhere else? And you never once asked whether that was the right question. Maybe it was the commute. Maybe it was one person. Maybe it was that nothing you do there is ever finished. Each of those is a different problem with a different answer, and

[4:32] only one of them is solved by a new job. Problem finding is just the discipline of staying in that uncomfortable zone a little longer, where the situation is still shapeless, and you haven't picked a target yet. Sit with the mess. Ask what exactly is wrong here three or four times before you let yourself answer. Skip this, and you'll be efficient your whole life, fast, decisive, admired for it, and you'll keep delivering excellent

[4:56] answers to questions nobody asked. Strategy two, write it as one sentence you could be wrong about. Most people's problems aren't problems, they're moods with a topic attached. My finances are a mess. My relationship is off. I'm not where I should be. You can carry a sentence like that for a decade, because there's nothing in it to act on. It can't be tested, it can only be felt. Now, watch what happens when you write instead. I spend more than I earn in the last 10 days of every month. That sentence can be checked. It can be wrong. And because it can be wrong, it can also be solved,

[5:30] and you'll know when it is. The test is simple. Write your problem down in one sentence, then ask what evidence would prove that sentence false. If nothing could, you haven't got a problem yet. You've got a feeling, and feelings don't respond to strategy. The cost of skipping this one is the quietest cost on the list. You don't fail, you just carry the same heavy undefined thing for years and call it your life. Strategy three, distrust your first good idea. Not your first bad idea. Bad ideas are harmless. They

[6:01] announce themselves and get discarded. The dangerous one is the decent one. The one that works well enough to end the search. That's the chess study applied to your actual life. The workable solution arrives, your attention quietly shuts the door behind it, and everything after that is you defending a decision you never really made. And I want to be blunt with you here because this is the part that stings. Most of the problems you describe as hard are not hard. You took the first answer that seemed reasonable, sometimes years ago, and you've spent every year since managing the consequences and calling that difficulty. The job you took

[6:37] because it was there. The way you handle conflict because it's how your family handled it. The plan you made at 22 that you're still executing at 35. You didn't fail to find something better. You stopped looking and told yourself you were still looking. The practical move is small. When you find a solution you like, write it down, then force yourself to generate two more before you're allowed to evaluate any of them. Not to be clever, just to keep the search open

[7:02] past the moment it naturally closes. Strategy four, explain it out loud step by step. In 2002, Yale researchers Leaned and Rosenblatt and Frank Keil asked people how well they understood everyday things. A zipper, a toilet, a bicycle. Everyone rated themselves high. Then they were asked to explain step by step how the thing actually works, then rate themselves again. The second score was always lower. They called it the illusion of explanatory depth. We mistake familiarity for understanding, and the illusion holds right up until the moment we try to produce the middle of the explanation and find nothing

[7:40] there. Your problems are full of these gaps. Try it. Explain out loud to a real person or an empty room exactly why your business isn't growing or why that friendship went cold. Not the summary, the mechanism step-by-step, each step causing the next. You'll hit a sentence you can't finish. That sentence is the actual problem and you've walked past it a hundred times because at summary level it looked solved. Skip this and you'll keep confusing the feeling of understanding something with having ever examined. Strategy five. Hand it to a stranger who happens to be you. Notice what the first four have in common. Not

[8:16] one of them made you more intelligent. They all just turned the difficulty dial down before the thinking began. This next one is the clearest example. Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross ran three experiments with nearly 700 participants testing something they named after King Solomon, the ruler famous for brilliant judgment about everyone's life except his own. Participants reasoned about a betrayal. Some reasoned about their own,

[8:39] some about a friend's. People were measurably wiser about the friends. They saw more perspectives, admitted the limits of what they knew, allowed that things might change. Same brain, same problem, dramatically better reasoning. Then came the useful half. When people were asked to think about their own situation from a distance, describing it in the third person, using their own name, the gap closed. So, do that on purpose. Write your problem as though it belongs to someone else. Then advise that person. You'll be calmer, straighter, and more honest because your ego isn't standing in the room. Strategy six. Start from the failure and work backwards. Here's an odd quirk of the

[9:17] mind. Asking what could go wrong produces a short, polite list. Assuming it already went wrong produces a flood. Researchers Deborah Mitchell, Jay Russo, and Nancy Pennington showed this back in 1989. When people imagined an outcome as certain rather than possible, they generated roughly a third more reasons for it and their reasons were far more concrete. The psychologist Gary Klein turned that into a technique called the premortem. Before you commit, imagine it's a year later, and the thing has definitively failed. Now, write down why. The reason this works is social as much as mental. Raising a risk normally makes you the pessimist. In a premortem, the failure is a given, so naming its

[9:57] causes isn't disloyalty, it's the task. You can run it alone in 10 minutes on a business, a move, a relationship decision. Skip it, and you'll keep discovering your obstacles in the order they arrive, which is always the most expensive order. Strategy seven, steal the answer from a field that isn't yours. There's a famous experiment by Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak. People are given a medical problem, a tumor that needs destroying with rays strong enough to kill it, but not the healthy tissue

[10:25] around it. Cold? About 10% solve it. Now, the interesting part, another group first reads an unrelated story about a general who can't march his whole army down one road to a fortress. So, he splits it into small groups that converge from every direction at once. That's the same solution in different clothes. Having just read it, only about 30% solved the medical problem. But, when they were simply told the story might help, around three quarters solved it. The answer was in their heads the whole time. They just didn't notice it was the same shape. So, ask deliberately, "Who else has already solved the structure of this?" Your

[10:59] scheduling problem is an airline boarding problem. Your motivation problem is an inventory problem. Your relationship problem might be a bandwidth problem. Say it out loud in someone else's vocabulary, and the solution often walks straight in. Strategy eight, put it down on purpose. A 2009 review by Ut Na Sio and Thomas Ormerod pulled well over 100 studies on incubation, the effect of setting a

[11:22] problem aside. There is a real benefit. It's also modest, and it comes with conditions most people ignore, so I'd rather give you the conditions than the myth. The break only helps after genuine effort. Walking away from a problem you haven't wrestled with does nothing. And the break works best when what you do during it is undemanding. A walk, dishes, a shower, something that

[11:43] occupies your hands and not your head. Scrolling isn't a break, it's a different load. What's happening is simple enough. Distance loosens the grip of the first idea, the one your attention locked onto. You come back and the board looks different. So, this is not permission to avoid the problem, it's the opposite. Work hard, then leave

[12:02] deliberately with a time you'll return. Avoidance has no return time. That's the whole difference. Strategy nine, solve the pattern, not the instance. Some problems are events. Most of the ones ruining your year are not. They're structures wearing the costume of an event. The third time you have the same argument, it isn't an argument anymore. It's a design. The Sunday night dread that shows up every single week isn't about this week's work. The friend who drains you every time you meet isn't having an unusually bad month. Here's the test. Ask whether this has happened before in a different outfit. If it has, solving today's version is maintenance,

[12:40] not repair. You'll do it well, and it'll be back. Instance solving feels productive because something visibly gets handled. Pattern solving feels like nothing is happening right up until the problem stops appearing at all. And this is where most competent people lose entire decades. They get extraordinarily skilled at handling something they could have removed. Strategy 10, know what a problem costs to keep. In 1985, Hal Arcs and Catherine Bloomer ran a field study on theater season tickets. Some sold at full price and some discounted at

[13:11] random. The people who paid the most attended the most plays, not because they enjoyed them more, because they'd paid more, and leaving it unused felt like waste. That's the sunk cost effect, and it's why quitting is the most underrated problem-solving skill there is. You don't stay in the wrong job, project, or relationship because it's working. You

[13:33] stay because of what's already in it. Time, money, identity, the story you told people, but the money is gone either way. The only real question is what the next year costs, and what you choose if you were arriving at this today with no history. Every problem you refuse to abandon charges you rent, and it charges you in the only currency that never comes back. That's the 10. And here's the thing nobody tells you about applying them. Your problems don't get smaller. Life doesn't hand you a lighter

[14:02] load because you got better at thinking. What changes is that you stop inheriting the difficulty setting you were handed. You stop accepting the first version of the question, the first workable answer, the first story about why it's hard. And because you're no longer resolving the same four problems in new outfits every year, something strange starts

[14:19] happening. Your problems become new. That's the real marker of a life on easy mode. Not fewer problems, fresher ones. The philosopher Karl Popper spent his life on this idea and eventually put it in four words. All life is problem solving. He meant it literally, from the simplest organism adjusting to its environment all the way up to a physicist rewriting our picture of the

[14:41] universe. Same process at every level. Something isn't working, you propose a fix, reality corrects you, you propose a better one. That's not an interruption to living. That is living. You were never going to reach a version of your life with no problems in it, and if you had, it wouldn't have been peace. It would have been stillness. So, the only real question is what quality of problem

[15:03] you want to be working on. Out of the 10, which one do you skip the most? Be honest with yourself and drop the number in the comments. I read them. And if you recognize your own first good idea somewhere in this video, the one you stopped to searching past years ago, you're not behind. You're just one better stated question away. If this was useful, hit like and send it to someone you watch solving the same problem over and over without ever stepping back to ask whether it's the right one. They might not see it from the inside. Your understanding today might be exactly what helps them. Thanks for staying with

[15:36] me until the end. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so we can keep exploring the hidden mechanics of the mind together. Goodbye and see you next time.

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