The missing puzzle piece

I’ve had this experience a couple of times by now:

I have this bug.

I’ve been working on it a lot: I’ve disentangled and mapped out what ‘it’ is about. Tried tackling it with different techniques, from different angles. I’ve also mapped out the entire space around the bug. It feels like I know everything about it.

And still. The bug remains unsolved.

***

In the past, solving some of my biggest bottlenecks involved not more than one single, simple mental move.

A small piece of information that was missing; a simple act of pointing out this one thing I had been disregarding; reframing this one piece of information or emotion, simply looking at it from a different angle; encouraging this intuition I had, but didn’t trust enough to fully buy into; etc. [1]

Once I finally found the missing puzzle pieces, the subsequent ‘moments of resolution’ felt unilaterally very underwhelming and very transformative at the same time. I have mixed feelings about this...

Either way, this made me realize that one failure mode of mine is to be looking for this ‘big, exciting, groundbreaking revelations’ that will allow me to solve my bug.

This expectation, however, can make me blind to what would actually solve the bug.  

An analogy: Our eyes adapt to whether we are looking at things close up or far away from us. We can skim the space for some large object, or we can scan it for some tiny object. If you’ve tried to spot wildlife somewhere in the bushes or savanna, you might have encountered that, once you learned what sort of thing you are looking for, spotting it because much easier. When searching for some visual object, we are primed to what we think is its likely size and shape or colour. This allows us to be better at finding the object of interest - if we are primed right.

What does that mean for rationality?

Insight 1 : When you are onto that bug - having nearly exhausted your arsenal of techniques and sources of information while the bug remains unsolved - you might want to consider the possibility that you are scanning the solution space at a different level of resolution, than where your solution is to be found.

***

In some sense, this is exciting. Big, nasty bugs might just need a teeny tiny gesture in the right direction and they dissolve into warm air.

At the same time, finding that missing puzzle piece is much like finding the needle in the haystack.

The first step is to notice that you might be facing such a situation, so you can consider changing your level of resolution.

I’ve started to develop a taste for bugs that only need a tiny piece of information for everything to fall into place properly. However, even knowing that, it often remains largely intractable to identify what that missing part is about.

Usually, the missing piece has to do with something that involves my ‘ego’. This is probably the main reason why it is really hard to find it myself.

The only somewhat reliable way to go about this (that I’ve discovered and tried so far) is to reach out to other people for help. Their outside perspective on things, and sometimes their additional life experience, can be all that is needed.

At times, I would just throw all I know about the issue at them, letting them do the work of rephrasing my story and pointing at what I might be missing. It can be useful to just ask them to share their understanding of this thing and try to notice where I’m surprise or confused, or spot a mismatch between our models.

Some people are extremely skilled at pointing out these blind spots in others. Given that one cannot really observe anything in particular they’re doing, it often creates the impression of them having a secret magic power. (Which is not the case.)

Here some of my guesses for what makes a person good at this. Most of these people just have a lot of life experience to draw from. They probably simply have had a similar problem in the past and can tell you the password. Also, these people seem to be usually good at spotting patterns, often even based on very scarce information. I guess many patterns are fairly common across humans, so being able to spot pattern likely correlates with life experience.

And so, it happens that ‘big annoying bugs I have been battling with for so long’ are resolved in not more than a minute, due to not more than a tiny gesture.

To be fair, reaching out to people hoping to find the missing puzzle piece can also utterly fail. The times it failed for me, I might have had too big expectations, wanted to outsource the work too  much to someone else? I might have done a really bad job at communicating what I was after, in the first place? I imagine it can feel bewildering when someone comes up to you, lays out the entire map of their bug-landia, and then looks at you, expecting you to do… what exactly??

At the end of the day, you probably just have to try a lot, to find the one person that does have/know about the missing puzzle piece. This attempt might fail a lot. But when it works, well it works.

***

Who best to reach out to in order to help with blind spots? My answer here is bad, namely : it depends.

I have made different experiences. Roughly speaking, there are two categories: i) people that know you very well, and ii) people that hardly know you at all.

People that know me very little also tend to not have their own ego entangled in my story. (This seems to correlate, is not always true though.) This can be helpful in order to bring an outside view and give unbiased advice.

On the other hand, in some situations, it had been essential that the person knew me very well, meaning they had a lot of background information about who I am, how I normally function and where I’m coming from.

***

The next step, after having found the missing puzzle piece, is to properly internalize it and make it a part of yourself. I have recently started to think more about internalization and will treat, and experiment with, it sometime soon - as it’s one sub-skill to master as part of my larger quest(s).

[1] Some examples of puzzle pieces I have been missing:
- Simply and bluntly dismissing an entire bucket of S1 information/input.
- Realizing that what I thought of as being the problem wasn’t necessarily and unilaterally bad.
- Noticing and letting go of ‘shoulds’ and ‘not allowed to think/feel/want this’.
- Realizing that I could also just not do the thing.
- Introducing a sense of playfulness or curiosity.
- Reframing an underlying sense of scarcity.

Geneva to Prague, September 2018 - Resolution