Use my lists of “Idea-Inducing Questions” to generate nearly endless ideas to write about, think about, or discuss!

Questions about learning and truth-seeking

• Recently learned: what’s a powerful idea, concept, or mental model that you’ve been learning about recently that you think is worth knowing?

• Changed opinions: what is a strongly held belief you used to have that you changed your mind about? What caused you to change your mind? Why do you think you were wrong before?

• Influential book: what is the name of one book that substantially influenced the way you think about things? What did you learn from it that you can pass on to your audience?

• Debates: what’s something you disagree with a certain group of people on? What do you think is the core of the disagreement?

• Thorny problems: Is there a complex problem, situation, idea, concept, or a set of competing ideas that you’re still trying to understand or figure out your opinion on? What are the factors that are driving your opinion in different directions or that make the issue tricky to figure out? What are the open questions or confusions you have about it still?

• Third perspectives: For any pair of opposing ideas that most people in the public sphere take either one side or the other on, can you think of a third perspective or synthesis of both ideas that could actually be better than taking either side?

• Misconceptions: What’s a commonly believed idea that you think is actually wrong or a misconception?

• Underrated or overrated ideas: What’s a powerful or useful idea that you think is significantly underrated? Or conversely, what’s an idea that is talked about a lot in a positive light that you think is overrated or that isn’t actually a good idea?

• Epistemics: how do you think about what to believe versus what ideas to reject? How do you approach understanding hotly-contested, thorny, or highly complex topics? What mental models or approaches do you use to help you think more clearly or analyze questions or evaluate evidence?

Questions about ideas that have useful applications

• Beneficial ideas: what’s an idea that, if it became widely known and adopted/used, would greatly improve the world?

• Versatile ideas: what powerful idea or concept do you think has many different useful applications across many life domains?

• Psychology tools: what’s a powerful idea, concept, mental model, or tool from psychology that you think is useful to people’s lives?

• Tools for making sense: what’s a powerful idea, concept, mental model, or tool that you think can help people better understand or make sense of the world?

• Scientific principles: what principle from a mathematical or scientific field (e.g., economics, statistics, evolutionary biology, etc.) do you think is important or valuable to know about (because it helps you understand the world or because there are applications of it to daily life)? How can you apply this idea in life?

Questions about your own ideas and experiences

• Your ideas: What’s an idea you’ve come up with that you think would be valuable for your audience to hear about?

• Ideas you’ve applied: What’s an idea that you’ve found to be very useful or powerful in your own life? How have you applied it successfully?

• Unique experiences: what’s something you have experienced that very few people have experienced (whether it’s a good thing, a bad thing, or just something strange or surprising)? What did you learn from that experience?

• On your mind: What’s an idea you’ve been thinking about a lot lately? What are your current thoughts about it?

• Area of expertise: what topic are you very knowledgeable about? What is the most valuable idea from that field that you think many people would benefit from knowing about?

Questions about unusual or neglected ideas

• Powerful obscure ideas: In your opinion, what is one of the most valuable or important ideas or concepts that most people don’t know about?

• Contrarian ideas: What’s something you disagree with most smart, educated people about (according to your own definition of smart and educated)? Or what’s your answer to the Thiel question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

• Overlooked areas: What’s a topic area that very few people have an opinion on or knowledge of, that you think it’s important to have an opinion on, or that is well worth learning about?

This piece was first written on August 2, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 27, 2022.

The idea that you should “just trust your gut” – that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) – is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we’re best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short).

Case 1: Fast decisions
There is no choice but to make the decision quickly, so thinking it through is infeasible. In this case, intuition is your only option because it’s the only method of deciding that’s fast enough.

Examples:
– the car barreling towards you in the other lane has just swerved into your lane
– you’re in a job interview and are asked whether you’d still be interested in this job if it pays less than your prior job
– the train you’re thinking of taking is about to depart, and there is no other train for five hours

Case 2: Irrelevant decisions
The decision is of low importance, so minimizing time, effort, and indecisiveness is more important than optimizing for the best outcome. In this case, intuition is your best option because it’s the least costly.

Examples:
– you are trying to decide whether to put carrots on your salad
– you are trying to decide what TV show to watch tonight
– you are trying to decide which $5 product to buy among several similar options

Case 3: Repetitious decisions
You have lots of experience making decisions in that realm AND received reliable information on how the decisions turned out. In this case, intuition is trustworthy because it’s been honed through practice with feedback.

Examples:
– a heart surgeon who is conducting her 500th heart surgery (but not a heart surgeon who is conducting her 2nd heart surgery)
– a digital marketer writing email newsletter headlines who has been tracking the performance of each such email for five years (but not one who doesn’t track the performance of the emails)
– a chess player making a decision about which move to make after playing chess daily for years (but not a chess player playing backgammon)

Case 4: Evolutionary decisions

It’s the sort of survival-relevant decision that our ancestors had to make regularly 20 thousand to 200 thousand years ago, and hence we should expect that evolution built us to have reasonable instincts in this domain. In this case, our intuitions are quite reliable: our genes endow us with these intuitions precisely because they helped earlier copies of our genes survive.

Example:
– should you eat that foul-smelling old food?
– is that person who has been staring at you likely to have malicious intent?
– should you walk on that injured knee that’s causing searing pain?

So, to recap, I think pure intuition is the right solution pretty much only for FIRE decisions, that is, those that are:

(1) Fast (because you don’t have time for anything else)

(2) Irrelevant (because the costs of other approaches are too high)

(3) Repetitious (because with lots of practice, when we’re receiving reliable feedback, our intuition becomes well-honed)

(4) Evolutionary (because certain types of decision-related instincts are built into our biology)

In other words, if you weren’t born with the ability to make the decision intuitively (non-evolutionary decisions), you didn’t learn to make that kind of decision intuitively (non-repetitious decisions), the stakes are high enough that it’s worth using the best approach (non-irrelevant decisions) and you have time to use another approach (non-fast decisions) then you should indeed use another approach.

So if a decision is not FIRE, you’re probably best off thinking the decision through carefully, discussing the decision with others, writing out pros and cons, etc. Intuition still plays a very important role in those cases, but it plays a supporting role (e.g., to help you figure out things like what you value, to help you estimate likelihoods, to help you synthesize lots of information into an overall judgment, etc.) rather than playing the only role.

I’ll emphasize since it is so important: intuition almost always plays a critical role in decision-making. The question here is just whether you’re merely (1) “going with your gut” (for the whole decision), or whether you are (2) feeding your intuitions (which might include intuitions about what you value, what you predict is true, what you feel, etc.) into a broader decision-making process.

I think that using just your intuition on important non-FIRE decisions tends to produce bad life outcomes.

So don’t just go with your gut. Go with your gut when your decision is FIRE, and otherwise, let your gut be a really useful tool, rather than letting it be in charge of the whole process.

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Sam Rosen for his help improving this framework. 

This essay was first written on April 7, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 30, 2021.

It’s easy for us to believe that our side is fully right, and therefore that the other side is completely wrong. That’s typically what both our own side and the other is convinced of, and usually, we’re all mistaken!

Since most of us discuss these controversial issues with people who share our perspective, and most of us read sources that seem trustworthy according to our existing world view, we rarely hear the arguments of the other side portrayed by someone we view as credible. This makes it easier to believe that the other side’s beliefs are a consequence of stupidity, ignorance, or evil; as opposed to being caused by differing base values, a different view on the importance of good and bad aspects of a subject, or a different interpretation of the evidence.

Once our brains decide something is beneficial, we find it harder to remember the drawbacks. We may even deny they exist or view anyone who mentions these drawbacks as a rival. Likewise, if we’ve decided something is not beneficial, there may be intense psychological pressure to forget or deny the beneficial aspects. But reality rarely divides good and bad into such neat packages (at least, when it comes to big, controversial policy issues).

Consider some examples of how benefits and drawbacks can exist concurrently:

(1) Nuclear power plants are good in that they can provide large amounts of clean energy. Nuclear power plants are also bad because they are expensive, they sometimes have nuclear meltdowns, and they produce radioactive waste products that have to be safely stored for a very long time. How valuable nuclear power plants are, depends on how important clean energy is to you, relative to how probable and serious you think nuclear meltdowns are, and also how bad you think their radioactive waste is, all in comparison to other options for producing energy.

(2) Restricting gun purchasing is beneficial because people with guns sometimes use them to kill others or themselves, which they might not have achieved without a gun. Restricting gun purchasing is not beneficial because people (in the U.S. anyway) enjoy owning, practicing with, and collecting guns and because people believe (sometimes correctly) that guns provide protection. Also, individual gun ownership could be considered a constitutional right, so not allowing it may weaken other constitutional protections.

(3) Raising the minimum wage is beneficial because it increases the income of the disadvantaged, improving their lives and helping them provide for their families. Raising minimum wage could be bad because, in some cases, it probably increases unemployment (e.g., by preventing certain types of businesses from coming into existence or by triggering downsizing). It likely causes some companies to fail that would have otherwise succeeded.

(4) Legalizing marijuana is beneficial because it reduces arrests for victimless crimes and because marijuana may be helpful in certain medical contexts (e.g., when dealing with chronic pain). Also, many people enjoy using it. But legalizing marijuana is bad because some people develop marijuana dependence (e.g., 9% of users by one estimate: http://bit.ly/1Rwn6FN), use of it may temporarily reduce motivation as well as motor control and working memory (http://bit.ly/2Dr3bxc) especially in new users, it causes paranoid symptoms for some people, and for some small percentage of users, it may trigger psychotic episodes and perhaps (though the causality is very tough to untangle) even increase the chance of schizophrenia (http://n.pr/2DASWWv).

(5) Legalizing prostitution is good because it can make prostitutes safer (e.g., by making it easier for them to report being attacked) and because it can reduce the spread of disease (e.g., by mandating condom use and regular HIV screening). But legalizing prostitution is bad because it may increase the amount of marital infidelity in society, may increase people viewing sexuality in a transactional manner or increase objectification, and may cause more people to enter a field that causes various risks they did not fully anticipate (e.g., violence, psychological effects, health effects).

As exemplified above, controversial issues are bundles of good and bad, and saying you support something should mean that you think on the net the good outweighs the bad.

“Good” things should be thought of as only good on balance, meaning more good than bad once both the good and bad have been fully taken into account. Being good on balance is not the same as uniformly being “good,” despite our brains often forgetting the difference.

You can fully support a policy while still acknowledging that the opposing side is right that it (like most such things) has downsides too. And if someone tells you, they think a policy will have some negative consequences, that doesn’t mean they support the “other” side.

1. I just made a huge mistake; what on earth is wrong with me? How the hell could I be so stupid?

Reframe: I’ll learn so much from this mistake that I’m never going to make one like it again.

2. This bag is too heavy, I have to walk way too far

Reframe: Exercise is healthy, and people pay trainers to get them to lift heavy stuff or go on the treadmill, this is just exercise with the world as my trainer!

3. This train/bus/line is taking forever, what a pain!

Reframe: This is a great time to read an interesting article, listen to one of my favorite songs, text a friend that I haven’t spoken to in a while, think about the big decision I have to make soon, or recall what I learned in that book I read recently

Note: For your safety, don’t do these things if you are driving

4. I’m badly losing this argument; this is irritating. I need to work harder to prove I’m right.

Reframe: I’ll end up with more accurate beliefs and prove that I’m the sort of person that can change my mind if I acknowledge that the other person has made a good argument, and it may even make them think better of me (compared to desperately trying to prove their good argument wrong).

5. That person I thought I had a good conversation with never replied when I contacted them, I must have done something offputting.

Reframe: There are numerous reasons why someone wouldn’t reply (email went to spam, forgot to reply, personal crises, didn’t have a great first impression of me, not looking to make friends, went traveling, etc.), and this person doesn’t know what I’m really like, so it can’t be deeply personal, but I can certainly work more at making a great first impression to reduce the chance it happens in the future

6. I failed at this thing I tried really hard at; there must be something wrong with me.

Reframe: If I never fail, I’m not trying things that are hard enough to challenge me, and each time I try something hard, I will have some chance of success and some chance of failure, so failure is totally expected and normal, though I should try my best to diagnose why it happened so I can improve.

7. This is so incredibly unfair; I can’t stand it.

Reframe: This is something I really don’t like, and that might make a lot of people unhappy. I should definitely try to change it if I can, but there is no rule that says the world is fair; the universe owes me nothing. I’ve withstood plenty of bad things in the past, and I can and will withstand this, as I work to make the thing better.

8. That random bad thing I just thought of might just happen, that would be bad if it did; I’d better mull that possibility over in my mind.

Reframe: [if it’s minor], so what if it does happen? I’ll get through it easily or [if there’s something I can do about it] I’ll plan to do this thing now or as soon as possible to reduce the risk or (if there’s not much of anything I can do) I could spend my whole life worrying about things I can’t change that might happen, but that would just make me miserable and not help anything so I should focus on something else now that will distract me.

9. I can’t believe my friend flaked out on me/did that annoying thing, it’s so disrespectful.

Reframe: [if I think they are unlikely to do this sort of thing again] that is not characteristic of this person, and everyone messes up sometimes, I’ve certainly messed up before, this is probably just a fluke, and I should forgive it, or [f you think they are likely to do this sort of thing again] I should make sure they know I don’t like when they behave like this, but beyond that, I then need to decide whether I want to be friends with someone who is prone to behave this way.

10. I can’t believe I did that bad/shameful thing many years ago, I still feel guilty about it.

Reframe: [if I’m no longer the sort of person who would do that thing] I did that long in the past, and the person I am now would never do it again, so it’s time to forgive myself, or [if I still am the sort of person who might do that thing] I’m still prone to doing things like that, I should deeply consider why that is, and what the next, concrete step I can take is towards no longer being better.

It’s tough to make real-life disagreements productive, but here are my favorite techniques for making it easier to do so. These help more if you are significantly motivated to use the disagreement to deepen mutual understanding of the issue.

I’m assuming here that you have control over your own behavior, but not over the other persons, because that’s the reality of almost all such situations. I’m not assuming that the other person is motivated to figure out the truth (e.g., they may be mostly motivated by “winning” the debate).

TIPS FOR HAVING MORE PRODUCTIVE REAL LIFE DISAGREEMENTS

(1) Avoid debates in front of others – if others are watching, it tends to create unproductive social dynamics. You or the person who disagrees with you may want to look good in the debate in front of those other people, which tends to push in the opposite direction of being open-minded and conceding when the other person has made a good point. What’s more, having other people involved increases the chance that the conversation gets derailed.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “Bob, what do you think about what we’re discussing?”

PRODUCTIVE: “Want to sit over there with me and discuss this in more detail?”

(2) Stay on topic – very often, the topic of disagreement will start to drift. Resist the urge to go follow tangents or switch what the debate is about, or you’ll lose focus. If someone says something new that you disagree with, resist the urge to address it if it isn’t related to the main point of contention.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “You’re wrong about that too.”

PRODUCTIVE: “We can discuss that point of disagreement later, but I’d be interested in returning to the subject we were discussing if you don’t mind.”

(3) Investigate first, don’t attack – when someone says something we strongly disagree with, we can be tempted to immediately attack their position. However, doing so sets up the discussion as a war. If the goal is to have a productive debate (where both you and the other person have a reasonable chance of making your views more accurate), then it’s much better to set the conversation up as a discussion where you can learn from each other instead. Avoid immediately jumping into attacking the other person’s position so that they aren’t put on the defensive and so that the conversation isn’t framed in terms of winning. This relates to Julia Galef’s concept of Scout Mindset (see: http://bit.ly/2fPYRJI), which I think is the right mindset to have when entering into a disagreement. You should be trying to understand the lay of the land, not firing cannons. If you fire cannons, you can expect cannon fire right back at you.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “There are at least three reasons you’re wrong about that.”

PRODUCTIVE: “Could you tell me more about that?”

(4) Clarify the other person’s claims – it’s surprisingly easy to have a long disagreement without fully understanding what the other person really meant. Typically you’ll need to ask a lot of clarifying questions early on so that you really understand what’s being claimed. If you refute the other person’s points, without having clarified, there is a good chance that you are arguing against something that isn’t quite what they believe. One of the best ways of making sure you’ve understood the other side is to repeat back the other person’s claims in your own words and ask if you’ve accurately reflected what they are saying.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “But X is not true because…”

PRODUCTIVE: “I think that what you’re saying is X, am I understanding that right?”

(5) Clarify definitions – language tends to be quite ambiguous. If the points you are making hinge on someone understanding your definition of a word, then take a moment to clarify what you mean by it. Or, if you notice that the way the other person is using a word may not be quite the way you use it, stop for a moment to explain your usage and to ask them to clarify their own. If you and the other party mean different things by word, it’s very hard to constantly keep that in mind without getting confused. It’s typically much better to either decide to switch over to the other person’s definition (once you’ve asked them to explain it) or to ask to switch to another word entirely that you both agree on the definition for. It’s a lot harder to get someone to successfully switch over to your definition than to simply resolve to switch over to theirs.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “We obviously don’t have free will because we don’t choose the things we fundamentally want.”

PRODUCTIVE: “Could you elaborate on what you mean by the phrase ‘free will’? I’m not sure I understand what you are using that phrase to mean.”

(6) Identify reason(s) for belief – don’t just stop at understanding what the other person is claiming. If you actually want to make progress in the debate, you’ll need to dig into the reasons behind their beliefs. Knowing why they believe what they do may cause you to agree with the other person more (because it helps you understand their reasoning) but, even if it doesn’t, it can also help you understand where the debate needs to focus in order to make progress. Without knowing why they believe what they do, you don’t know what points are most critical to discuss.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I don’t think X is true because….”

PRODUCTIVE: “What are the main reasons that you think X is true?”

(7) Gently probe the reasons you’re given – if someone tells you that the reason they believe X is Y, don’t assume that if you were to change their belief in Y, then belief X would change too. First of all, we are not always aware of the reasons we believe things, so while the person might think Y is the reason they believe X, they might be wrong (it could just be their best on the spot guess or the first argument their brain could put together – they may have even forgotten what caused them to believe X). Second, our beliefs may be propped up by multiple other beliefs, so even if the other person really does believe X because of Y, there may be other beliefs P and Q that would need to change at the same time for the other person to stop believing X. What’s more, a person may have an emotional attachment to X that isn’t really supported by conscious “reasons” at all (e.g., the idea of not believing X causes them anxiety, so if they start to sense that X is being challenged they try to defend it with whatever argument comes to mind first). So if the main point of contention in your debate is whether X is true, and the other party says they believe X because of Y, you’ll want to gently probe Y to understand better what’s really going on. This can be done with questions such as:

-“Is Y the main reason you believe X, or are there other important reasons you believe X as well?”

-“If you were no longer convinced of Y, do you think that would be enough to cause you to stop believing X?”

-“If it turned out that X was true, would you see that as a bad thing? Why?”

UNPRODUCTIVE: “But Y is not a convincing reason to believe X.”

PRODUCTIVE: “If you stopped believing that Y was true, would that change your mind about X?”

(8) Look for the critical points of disagreement – there may be a lot of reasons that you and the other person disagree, but they are unlikely to be equally important. Chances are, there are a small number of important points of contention that the disagreement hinges on. (see CFAR’s “double crux” technique: http://bit.ly/2xYjqOI for more about finding these “crux’s”). It can be helpful to frame finding the core points of disagreement as an explicit goal in the conversation and to enlist the other person’s help in figuring it out.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “Let’s go one by one through all the reasons we disagree.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I think our main point of disagreement is actually just Y. does that seem right to you? If not, I’d be really interested in finding out what our core points of disagreement really are.”

(9) Find common ground – agreeing tends to make people feel closer to each other and to make a debate feel less heated and awkward, so it’s good to point out the things that you do already agree on. Pointing out what you think you already agree on can also be helpful for clarification because you may discover hidden points of disagreement that you didn’t even realize were there.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “It looks like we really don’t agree on this topic.”

PRODUCTIVE: “It looks like we already agree on a number of things, including…”

(10) Look for ways you can learn – one of the best things about a disagreement is that it presents an opportunity to make your own views more accurate. Even if you are right overall on the topic, you can still correct minor errors in your beliefs and arguments and hone them for the future. Chances are the other person has at least SOME good points. Try to learn as much as you can from them. At the very least, you can learn about how someone gets to the point of believing something that you disagree with on this topic, which is useful to understand in its own right. On complex, controversial issues, it is almost always the case that both sides have some reasonable points. It’s valuable to know what the reasonable points on the other side are. Keep in mind also that, like everyone, you are totally wrong about some of the things that you strongly believe in. This might just be one of those topics. If that’s true, it’s better to find out now and then start being right about it, rather than continuing being wrong about the topic indefinitely.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I’m still not convinced.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I’d be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on Z because I’ve never thought about Z the way you’re presenting it.”

(11) Give credit when a good point is made – if the other person makes a good point, or changes your mind about something, tell them that. This might feel like conceding ground in the “battle,” but if you’re viewing the disagreement as a battle, then you are probably already not in a productive mode of discussion. Telling the other person that they made a good point or that they changed your mind about something shows good faith. It demonstrates that you are actually interested in listening to what they say and that you are not simply trying to beat them. That tends to make the other person less defensive, more open-minded, and more likely to be willing to admit that you changed their mind as well. It can help to frame the entire discussion as a collaborative enterprise to figure out the truth, rather than as a conflict between two people. Remember that finding out you are wrong about something is a gift that makes you more powerful because, the next time around, you’ll have truer beliefs and better arguments, as well as a deeper understanding of the world.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “What you said was not 100% true.”

PRODUCTIVE: “You made a great point about Z, which helps me understand this topic better.”

(12) Keep your ego out of it – if your ego is invested in coming out on top in the disagreement, or at least in not having your points refuted, then you are less likely to learn and more likely to turn the disagreement into a battle where the goal is winning. One nice trick for keeping your ego off to the side is to put forward claims without saying that you necessarily believe them. For instance, to keep an argument that you have uncertainty about at arm’s length, you can say, “Some people argue that Z, what do you think of that claim?” or if you aren’t sure you believe something, say “I’m not sure yet what I think about this yet, but one thing that comes to mind is Z.” You can also bring up the views of other people, as in “I was reading an article that said Z. What’s your reaction to that?” Using softening language can help too, such as “I’m thinking that” rather than “I believe that” or even worse, “I’ve always believed that.” The more your language makes the belief seem like a core part of your identity, the harder you may later feel it is to back down, even if you turn out to be totally wrong.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “I believe in Y.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I’m still figuring out what I think about Y. Some people say Z about it; what do you think of that argument?”

(13) Keep the other person’s ego out of it – if the other person’s ego is invested in winning (or at least not losing), it is likely going to tend to reduce the quality of the discussion. Make it as easy as possible for the other person to concede a point, for instance, by acknowledging that you understand why they think the thing and explaining how you see someone might come to that conclusion, or by emphasizing that another point they made was really good while you’re pointing out that this other point they made is weaker. Mentioning ways that you realize your own views were wrong can also be helpful, as it neutralizes the embarrassment of being wrong. If you used to believe the same thing that they do (but changed your mind about it), it can be helpful mentioning that as well to show that you understand why someone would take their side.

UNPRODUCTIVE: “You’re wrong about X.”

PRODUCTIVE: “I can understand why you said X, and you made a lot of good points about it. I think, though, that there is an important consideration that the argument you gave isn’t taking into account.”

You shouldn’t spoil the movie: imagine going to a movie that has a lot of good parts, but you don’t enjoy those good parts because while they’re happening, you keep thinking about the fact that the movie will eventually end. If it doesn’t make sense to do that in a movie, then it makes even less sense to do that in your life. You may find it helpful to simply note when disruptive thoughts about death occur and remind yourself at those times that they are counterproductive if they are distracting you from enjoying “the movie.”

Death doesn’t harm you while living or dead: if a person is alive, then death has not reached them yet, so a person’s death cannot harm that person while they are still living. If a person is dead, then they do not exist, and so can experience no harm. Hence your own death cannot harm you either when you are living or when you are dead. So if death is a harm to you, it is a harm to you during those seconds or minutes when you are transitioning from alive to dead, but at least that period is very short-lived and has not happened yet.

Death is bearable: if it is not death itself that you fear, but rather the suffering that sometimes comes before death, keep in mind that very, very few people commit suicide upon nearing death, suggesting that the suffering that sometimes comes before slow deaths is probably very rarely truly intolerable (unless the barrier to committing suicide is very high).

You are incredibly lucky to exist at all: you may not feel it every day (or even most days), but the fact that you exist is an extremely lucky chance occurrence. Consider, for instance, that male ejaculate contains on average about 280 million sperm, and that if ANY of these had fertilized your mother’s egg other than the one that did, you would not exist right now. And that’s just one of a vast number of coincidences that were required for you to be born.

It could be worse: there are probably quite a few things worse than total oblivion (hell, for instance, or just being tortured for years). To me, this contrast effect (comparing death to even worse things) makes me feel better about death itself since it is merely oblivion and could be worse.

Your impact can live on: the things you choose to do while alive can impact distant generations living long after you are gone, even if you are not a famous scientist or influential politician. For instance, if you have children, then the way you treat them will have effects on how they treat their children and hence how their children treat their own children, etc. (at least, assuming the world doesn’t end before then). Or, if over a span of a number of years you end up giving ten thousand dollars to malaria prevention, it could very well save a person’s life, which could have long-term positive consequences for that person’s parents and spouse and friends and children. More generally, there are ripple effects for many actions that you take, which end up having second-order and third-order consequences that could extend long past your lifespan.

Full acceptance can make it easier: instead of fighting mentally against the reality that you will die, truly accepting that it will happen and then focussing on how to live your life with this constraint can be less upsetting in the long run. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should give in to dying soon: you should still do everything you can to extend your life while fully accepting that it is eventually inevitable.

We’re in this together: remember that everyone who was born more than 125 years ago is now dead, that this is something all humans face, and that (unless some truly remarkable new technology is invented, which I’m hoping for, but which is a long shot) we all share this hardship. Talk to others about how they come to peace with death. Lean on them. You don’t need to go it alone.

You can have one hell of a ride: even though the ride must end, you can make it a damn good one. With hard work and some luck, you can have a truly amazing and meaningful time while you’re here.

Finiteness does not mean meaninglessness: occasionally, people find that the fact that things will end makes everything feel meaningless. But if you believe this is true, that implies that you believe things would only be meaningful if they lasted forever. I don’t know about you, but this intuitively feels false to me. My gut says the opposite is true, at least in the sense that finiteness imbues greater meaning to each minute, making time more precious.

Death is a reminder to deeply savor: because of death, we should make an extra effort to try to savor the taste of every bite of chocolate, the feeling on our skin when we walk outside into nice weather, the coziness of being indoors when it’s raining, the excitement of each deep connection we make with other human beings, the start of our favorite song, the smell of fresh air, and the thrill of grasping a new idea. If you lived forever, you could consume each of these things an infinite number of times, but you only have a finite number of each of them left, so experience them as fully and completely as you can manage.

Death is bad, but you can find peace with it: don’t get me wrong, death is NOT a good thing (except in the rare instances where it cuts a bad existence short). It is undeniably bad because it causes good things (things that we value) to cease. One day of happy, meaningful, altruistic life lived is better than just one hour of it, and one year of it is better still (all else held equal). Even if there are a few problems that death makes simpler, like overcrowding and avoiding the stagnation of ideas, in the absence of death, we could find better solutions for these problems. But even accepting that death is truly bad, it is something we can learn to be at peace with.
Consider returning to the list above when you feel your own mortality weighing on you heavily, and see which of these framings you find most helpful.

Note: If you’re a creator of wacky-concept restaurants, feel free to steal these ideas, just please invite me to the opening!

No Spoons (a.k.a. Soup Flight)
The entire menu always consists of 30 soups (most hot, some cold, most savory, a few sweet, most classic, a few experimental). They are only served in 1.5 ounce shot glasses, which you sip the soup from; no bowls or spoons. Anyone who brings their own spoon is permanently banned from ever coming again for the rest of their lives (after having their photo taken and put up on a special section of the wall). All soups are served with crispy whole wheat garlic crostini, which you’re encouraged to dip.

Classy Party (a.k.a. Rich Uncle)
No menu, fixed price, all you can eat (but you can only stay for 90 minutes, at which point a timer chimes on your table, and the waiters kick you out). The waiters are dressed to the nines in absurdly fancy outfits and walk around with silver trays of delicious-looking small hors d’oeuvres, the best that you’d find at a classy party, as well as trays of fancy drinks. You wave a waiter over whenever you want what they’ve got (as you do with dim sum). Certain special surprising Hors d’oeuvres (for instance, lavender pentagon mini doughnuts sprinkled in gold leaf) are brought out only rarely by the waiters (and only then in small quantities, on special golden trays), so people in the know keep their eyes peeled for these, and feel superior to the rest of the diners whenever they manage to nab something from a gold tray.

Data-Driven Dining (a.k.a. Randomized Controlled Table)
Yet another small bites restaurant. You don’t order from waiters; instead, you order from a tablet embedded in the center of each table, which digitally guides you through the ordering process. Here’s the twist, though: whatever you order comes in a pair. The two items are somewhat different versions of the same general thing. For instance, if you order the potato croquettes, you get two somewhat differently prepared potato croquettes. Once you’ve eaten them both, you tap on the iPad to indicate which of the two you like better, and the server brings you a third (matching the one you preferred). All the click data is recorded for analysis. In this way, each diner is part of a never-ending series of studies. Each day the chef analyzes yesterday’s data and uses it to inform his or her recipes for that day, discarding all the recipes that lost their match-up and preparing novel variations on those that won. The food endlessly iterates and improves.

Alien Sunset (a.k.a. Ylla)
The restaurant is based on an elaborate fictional alien world that has been thought through in tremendous detail (e.g., maybe based loosely on one of the short stories in “The Martian Chronicles”). The restaurant takes itself absurdly seriously, as one of the top restaurants on a faraway planet (that had a different form of intelligent life, with a very different culture). Each waiter is trained in the history and customs of this alien’s world and made to look alien. The waiters lead you through certain alien rituals at the table. The cutlery does not look familiar to humans. Each menu item references that alien world and a glossary and appendix in the back of the menu fleshes out the backstory and context. Alien items adorn the walls and fill display cases, for instance, the (fake) heads of surreal creatures. You can inspect these items at your leisure. You’re never really quite sure what the food is that you order, but it’s delicious. The toilets in the bathroom are unrecognizable and hard to figure out how to use. The odd lighting and bizarre architecture make it truly not feel like earth. Staff is told to never, ever, to break the fourth wall or reference anything on earth. Upon entering the restaurant, you have to choose something to wear (from a set of options) to make you too look and feel alien. The restaurant has large windows on all four sides and, out of each of them, you can see beautiful alien landscapes (it’s always sunset).

The King Is Mad (a.k.a. Follow the Rabbit)
At first, it seems like any other modestly elegant (but clearly traditional to the point of being stodgy) old restaurant. But then, when you inspect the menu, you realize that each menu item references ambiguous non-food “things” that the food is paired with. For instance, “Mushroom soufflé served with mysterious box” or “Napoleon Pastry, with Imperial Regalia” or “High tea platter with scones, tea sandwiches, and orange rhymes” or “Steaming spaghetti served on your lap” or “Tomato soup served with your choice of an impossibly large or impossibly small spoon” or “Flourless chocolate cake served to everyone but you.” or “Brussel sprouts in the dark.” Each item that you order involves some experience occurring, or something changing in the restaurant, or some object being presented to you, or something unexpected occurring during the delivery of the food.

Saucy (a.k.a. Fifths)
All the food is served in five thin slices (kept apart with thin separators), with each slice having a different sauce (which you pick from an insanely large number of sauce options). For instance, you could get the tofu steak (simultaneously) with sweet and sour sauce, Sriracha, Szechuan sauce, black pepper sauce, and mushroom miso sauce.

Mindful Eating (a.k.a. Presence)
Prix fixe menu only. Your meal is served in a special wooden mechanical box containing 25 small sealed compartments. The compartments are on a timer system, with one new compartment opening exactly every 3 minutes (so the entire meal takes 75 minutes). Each compartment contains just a few bites of food and comes with a one-sentence message attached (that you can only read once it opens) telling you what to focus on, do or notice while taking those bites. For instance, one message might tell you to notice the subtle hints of wasabi, another might suggest that you eat the next bite recalling a fond childhood memory, another might ask you to deeply inhale the scent before eating, and yet another might instruct you to pay close attention to the way the next bite will crunch in your mouth with the texture (but not taste) of potato chips. Each item has strong similarities with the last item but an obvious difference as well (e.g., one small scoop of sweet potato salad followed by one juicy sweet potato dumpling followed by one juicy mushroom dumpling followed by a tiny mushroom soup), so that through a progression of similar items you end up eating a wide variety of different things.

The Fruit Organ (a.k.a. Sweet Melody)
A small storefront, mainly occupied by a giant musical device that looks like an organ. But the device is hooked up to a dozen or so ever-rotating spheres of fruit juice/pulp (freshly blended that morning). Different chords on the organ are set to release different juices (down through tubes). You order the fruit smoothie you want by placing your plastic cup beneath where the tubing comes together and then asking for a specific song (that is known to produce that combination of fruits that you want), which the organist then plays for you (automatically preparing your drink as well as calculating the total that you owe). You can also go “off-menu” and order any famous song you like, which will create a unique random blend, replicable in the future if you like.

Talk (a.k.a. Strangers Dining)
You’re encouraged to go alone (though bringing one friend is allowed). You’re seated at a circular table for five people (i.e., with four strangers), which is small enough so that the whole table can easily talk together, and you have a meal together. All the tables at the restaurant seat 5, and you’re seated as soon as four other strangers arrive (or, with however many other strangers have arrived after 15 minutes as long as it’s at least one other person). The food is all served family-style (i.e., dishes are all to share). Each dish comes with a thought-provoking, deep, or provocative question written on the platter, which each person is encouraged to answer. A shortlist of rules at each table bans questions like “where are you from” and “where do you work” and comments on the weather. Instead, it suggests replacements like “where have you always wanted to live for a month?” and “what are you passionate about?” and comments regarding what you noticed about the other person.

Everything Fusion (a.k.a. Eat Everywhere)
The names of every country in the world (or, to be more practical, the 30 countries whose cuisines are most popular) are written on wooden balls or ping pong balls, one ball per country. The balls are placed into one of those “lottery draw” devices that makes it easy to draw them at random. Each month, the device is used to draw two random balls (that is, two random countries), ideally on a special night that is pre-announced so that people who happen to be dining at the restaurant that night (or who want to come for it) can witness the drawing. Then the head chef invents a dish that is a fusion of those two country’s cuisines (or, the recipe is crowdsourced from a submission section of the website, with the winning recipe chosen by the head chef and the winning submitter getting a free meal for two people). That new fusion dish is added to the menu, and another prior fusion (selected by the head chef) is removed from the menu. Even if “only” 30 countries are used, that’s still 435 possible fusions!

No Tables (a.k.a. The Angry Diner)
The menu has two hundred items on it, crammed way too close together, with unnecessary color splotches all over the place, in addition to pictures of random people (you have no idea who they are). It is open at odd hours and not open some days for no apparent reason. It only has a few tables. You can’t take a picture of the menu, ask if an item is vegetarian, bring more children than adults, order too little, order too much, come in a group of more than four people, ask for recommendations, or take too long to order, or the staff will promptly and ruthlessly throw you out. The menu items are confusing as hell (e.g., Macaroni and cheese pancakes with hot sauce? Slutty cakes? Zorros: cinnamon waffle potato? “Love buns” in 6 possible flavors, including cauliflower mango flavor). You are too afraid to ask questions about any of the items, though. The waiter sometimes refuses to give you what you ordered on the grounds that he has “never heard of it before” or because he thinks “it sounds gross.” Sometimes he’ll just stare at you as though you haven’t actually made your order until you panic and change it. [Note: this restaurant already exists in Manhattan; comment if you live in NYC and want its real name.]

The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface.

As a simple example, let’s consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8×8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece has a pre-determined fixed rule for how it moves across the board and captures other pieces. There are far more than a quintillion (i.e., 1,000,000,000,000,000,000) such games, and while many of these games are less than entertaining, there will be games in this set that are far better than chess along any dimension of gaming that you should care to consider. In other words, chess is our limited human attempt to mine a tiny corner of game space.

Of course, this type of 8×8 board game is just a tiny subset of all types of games, which is, in itself, a minuscule subset of all types of ideas.

This VASTNESS of idea space is why I find it so valuable when a person or book mentions a powerful, plausible idea that I’ve never heard before, even if no evidence is provided for why I should believe the idea.

The chance that you would independently have thought up an idea that someone tells you about is vanishingly small (even if you feel like you COULD have thought of it). The act of raising a powerful, plausible hypothesis to your awareness can be hugely valuable. Mere identification of a point in idea-space can involve a ton of work, even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Of course, we can then do our own vetting of ideas, even if the people who bring them to our attention don’t give us strong reasons to believe them. For instance, we can check them against facts that we already have strong reasons to believe. And we can ask ourselves, “does this idea contradict the evidence we have, or line up nicely with it? Does it explain things that confused us before and gel with other things we know to be true?” If we’re serious about testing the idea, we can even go out and gather new evidence about whether it’s true.

Some great ideas seem obviously true once you hear them. In fact, I’m a really big fan of trying to state the obvious; but not just any obvious things. The obvious things that people have likely not yet consciously considered. That is, what I like to call the “obvious and unsaid.” It bothers me when people dismiss obvious but rarely encountered ideas on the grounds that they seem obvious once you hear them because obviousness can be an asset rather than a liability.

These obviously true ideas can be especially valuable because they are easy to vet as being correct, yet due to the vastness of idea-space, they very easily could never have occurred to you before. So, stating obvious ideas that are rarely thought about, but which have important implications, can be an extremely efficient way to transmit value to others.

On a related point, when people say “everything’s already been done” or “there are no new ideas left,” the only way these statements could be sensible is if we interpret them as claims about humans rather than claims about ideas. For instance, as a claim that human minds are so similar to each other that, in the VAST space of possible ideas, we’re confined to a sad, well-trodden, little corner of derivative pseudo creativity.

However, I’m much more optimistic than this: while much is derivative, I think there are new ideas all over the place that we can learn to look for. As one person finds a new idea in a corner over there, and they share it over here, human knowledge advances. What’s more, I think that seeing new ideas as “derivative” is kind of missing the point.

Yes, good new ideas are often built from pieces of old ideas, but there’s nothing bad about that. Bricks are the building blocks of houses, and ideas are the building blocks of ideas.

Some classes that I might want to include are:

Thrive: staying happy and healthy.

This could include: 

• Cognitive-behavioral therapy skills training (to help ward off depression and anxiety)
• Emotional control strategies from dialectical behavioral therapy
• Behavioral activation strategies for working around self-defeating behaviors
• Problem-solving skills applied in realistic simulations of difficult situations
• Mindfulness/meditation training
• Learning the most robust and useful psychological findings on human happiness and mental health
• Practice noticing, identifying, interpreting, expressing emotions, savoring, gratitude, self-compassion, assertiveness
• The most robust and useful findings related to staying physically healthy (including how to exercise well and safely)
• How to manage disappointment and recover from failure (including actually failing and dealing with it), learning to set expectations

Disagree: how to figure out the truth.

This could include:

• The rules of making valid and evidence-based arguments rather than using rhetoric
• Practice learning from the other side as well as helping the other side see the truth of your perspective
• Material involving logic, philosophical argument, rhetorical fallacies, researching the different sides on an issue and forming a synthesis

Learn: becoming your own teacher. 

This could include:

• Principles of learning new information 
• How to research efficiently and remember what you learn (with opportunities to apply these skills to learn challenging topics)
• After teaching themselves the subject, they would distill the material, and then teach the most critical parts to their classmates, (with teachers available to help when they get stuck during the learning process)

Communicate: creating and maintaining good relationships. 

This could include: 

• Social skills theory and practice with simulations
• Public speaking principles with opportunities to practice
• Psychological theories on good relationships 
• Basics of fashion theory
• How to start conversations 
• How to handle controversial conversation topics
• How to deal with feelings of social anxiety
• How to give compliments
• How to talk to someone who is upset
• How to express yourself effectively when you are upset
• How to be vulnerable
• How to mediate between others
• How to give actively constructive responses
• Practice in simulations considering another’s perspective
• Learning empathy and model other people and their needs
• Understanding the destructive social actions of others

Help: doing good for others. 

This could include:

• Moral philosophy (including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and rights theory)
• Findings of experimental psychology, as demonstrated empirically, related to human morality
• Psychology of disgust
• Compassion meditation
• Discussions of the major controversial ethical topics and why one might fall on each side of them
• Altruistic assignments (e.g., students find ways to practice doing good both in and out of school)
• Famous experiments like the Milgram experiment and Jonathan Haidt’s ethics rationalization experiments
• Discussions on the effectiveness of doing good (e.g., the “happy coincidence” that doing good for others helps yourself)

Understand: why the world is the way it is.

This could include:

• Cosmology
• Evolutionary theory
• Tribal peoples
• Early history
• Industrial revolution
• Modern history
• Group Psychology
• Microeconomics
• Macroeconomics

Succeed: understanding and achieving your goals. 

This could include:

• An exploration of personal values and their bases 
• Effective goal setting
• Organizational skills
• Productivity techniques
• How to choose a career, 
• Components of success in practice (such as, consciousness, stick-with-it-ness, aiming at the right things, knowing what you want, getting help from others, meaning in work, desire for excellence, sense of self-efficacy) 
• Techniques for faster skill acquisition (such as always working at the edge of your ability and getting rapid feedback)
• Personal finance
• How to consciously design your environment for success

Live: important basic life skills. 

This could include:

• Healthy cooking
• Personal finance (e.g., investment, compounding, credit cards, interest, taxes, insurance, saving, and budgeting)
• Fixing common things that break
• Basic first aid and how to handle the most common medical problems

Decide: making good choices in an uncertain world.

This could include:

• Formulas for mean, median, standard deviation, and expected value
• Principles of good decision making and decision making biases
• The nature and function of beliefs (e.g., the idea that all beliefs have uncertainty, the idea that our own believing is merely evidence for something being true, the problem with all or nothing thinking, conditional expectation, correlation)
• Principles of probability (e.g., the many fallacies related to probabilities such as correlation not implying causation, opportunity cost, marginal thinking, Simpson’s paradox, rules of thumbs for making more accurate predictions, calibration training practice with both probabilities and confidence intervals, nudges, defaults, the paradox of choice, bayesian thinking applied to real-world examples of the sort that kids would care about and encounter regularly)
• Randomization
• Experiments
• The scientific method
• Practice developing hypotheses and testing them
• Working with basic data

Create: the joy of making new things. 

This could include:

• The students create meaningful things that they’ve envisioned while learning and consistently practicing the relevant skills to execute their ideas. 
• Essay writing
• Carpentry
• Robotics
• Fiction writing
• Prototyping
• Design
• Music
• Art (e.g., sculpture)
• Software
• Game making
• Theater/Performance
• Public speaking
• Film

Below are the 26 general purpose problem solving techniques that I like best, along with a one-word name I picked for each, and hypothetical examples to illustrate what sort of strategy I’m referring to.

Consider opening up this list whenever you’re stuck solving a challenging problem. It’s likely that one or more of these techniques can help!

General Purpose Techniques for Solving Challenging Problems of All Kinds

1. Clarifying – try to define the problem you are facing as precisely as you can, maybe by writing down a detailed description of exactly what the problem is and what constraints exist for a solution, or by describing it in detail to another person, which may lead to you realizing the problem is not quite what you had thought, or that it has a more obvious solution than you thought.

Life Example: “I thought that I needed to find a new job, but when I thought really carefully about what I don’t like about my current job, I realized that I could likely fix those things by talking to my boss or even, potentially, just by thinking about them differently.”

Startup Example: “we thought we had a problem with users not wanting to sign up for the product, but when we carefully investigated what the problem really was, we discovered it was actually more of a problem of users wanting the product but then growing frustrated because of bad interface design.”

2. Subdividing – break the problem down into smaller problems in such a way that if you solve each of the small problems, you will have solved the entire problem. Once a problem is subdivided it can also sometimes be parallelized (e.g., by involving different people to work on the different subcomponents).

Startup Example: “My goal is to get company Z to become a partner with my company, and that seems hard, so let me break that goal into the steps of (a) listing the ways that company Z would benefit from becoming a partner with us, (b) finding an employee at company Z who would be responsive to hearing about these benefits, and (c) tracking down someone who can introduce me to that employee.”

Math Example: “I want to prove that a certain property applies to all functions of a specific type, so I start by (a) showing that every function of that type can be written as a sum of a more specific type of function, then I show that (b) the property applies to each function of the more specific type, and finally I show that (c) if the property applies to each function in a set of functions then it applies to arbitrary sums of those functions as well.”

3. Simplifying – think of the simplest variation of the problem that you expect you can solve that shares important features in common with your problem, and see if solving this simpler problem gives you ideas for how to solve the more difficult version.

Startup Example: “I don’t know how to hire a CTO, but I do know how to hire a software engineer because I’ve done it many times, and good CTOs will often themselves be good software engineers, so how can I tweak my software engineer hiring to make it appropriate for hiring a CTO?”

Math Example: “I don’t know how to calculate this integral as it is, but if I remove one of the free parameters, I actually do know how to calculate it, and maybe doing that calculation will give me insight into the solution of the more complex integral.”

4. Crowd-sourcing – use suggestions from multiple people to gain insight into how to solve the problem, for instance by posting on Facebook or Twitter requesting people’s help, or by posting to a Q&A site like Quora, or by sending emails to 10 people you know explaining the problem and requesting assistance.

Business Example: “Do you have experience outsourcing manufacturing to China? If so, I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts about how to approach choosing a vendor.”

Health Example: “I have trouble getting myself to stick to doing exercise daily. If you also used to have trouble getting yourself to exercise but don’t anymore, I’d love to know what worked to make it easier for you.”

5. Splintering – if the problem you are trying to solve has special cases that a solution to the general problem would also apply to, consider just one or two of these special cases as examples and solve the problem just for those cases first. Then see if a solution to one of those special cases helps you solve the problem in general.

Startup Example: “I want to figure out how to improve employee retention in general, let me examine how I could have improved retention in the case of the last three people that quit.”

Startup Example: “I want to figure out how to convince a large number of people to become customers, let me first figure out how to convince just Bill and John to become customers since they seem like the sort of customer I want to attract, and see what general lessons I learn from doing that.”

6. Reading – read the books or textbooks that seems most related to the topic, and see whether they provide a solution to the problem, or teach you enough related information that you can now solve it yourself.

Economics Example: “Economists probably have already figured out reasonable ways to estimate demand elasticity, let’s see what an econometrics textbook says rather than trying to invent a technique from scratch.”

Mental Health Example: “I’ve been feeling depressed for a long time, maybe I should read some well-liked books about depression, such as ‘Feeling Good.'”

7. Searching – think of a similar problem that you think practitioners, bloggers or academics might have already solved and search online (e.g., via google, Q&A sites, or google scholar academic paper search) to see if anyone has done a write-up about how they solved it.

Advertising Example: “I’m having trouble figuring out the right advertising keywords to bid on for my specific product, I bet someone has a blog post describing how to approach choosing keywords for other related products.”

Machine Learning Example: “I can’t get this neural network to train properly in my specific case, I wonder if someone has written a tutorial about how to apply neural networks to related problems.”

8. Unconstraining – list all the constraints of the problem, then temporarily ignore one or more of the constraints that make the problem especially hard, and try to solve it without those constraints. If you can, then see if you can modify that unconstrained solution until it becomes a solution for the fully constrained problem.

Startup Example: “I need to hire someone who can do work at the intersection of machine learning and cryptography, let me drop the constraint of having cryptography experience and recruit machine learning people, then pick from among them a person that seems both generally capable and well positioned to learn the necessary cryptography.”

Computer Science Example: “I need to implement a certain algorithm, and it needs to be efficient, but that seems very difficult, so let me first figure out how to implement an inefficient version of the algorithm (i.e., drop the efficiency constraint), then at the end I will try to figure out how to optimize that algorithm for efficiency.”

9. Distracting – fill your mind with everything you know about the problem, including facts, constraints, challenges, considerations, etc. and then stop thinking about the problem, and go and do a relaxing activity that requires little focus, such as walking, swimming, cooking, napping or taking a bath to see if new ideas or potential solutions pop into your mind unexpectedly as your subconscious continues to work on the problem without your attention.

Example: “For three days, I’ve been trying to solve this problem at work, but the solution only came to me when I was strolling in the woods and not even thinking about it.”

Example from mathematician Henri Poincaré: “The incidents of the travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go someplace or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.”

10. Reexamining – write down all the assumptions you’ve been making about the problem or about what a solution should look like (yes – make an actual list). Then start challenging them one by one to see if they are actually needed or whether some may be unnecessary or mistaken.

Psychology Example: “We were assuming in our lab experiments that when people get angry they have some underlying reason behind it, but there may be some anger that is better modeled as a chemical fluctuation that is only loosely related to what happens in the lab, such as when people are quick to anger because they are hungry.”

Math Example: “I need to construct a function that has this strange property, and so far I’ve assumed that the function must be smooth, but if it doesn’t actually need to be then perhaps I can construct just such a function out of simple linear pieces that are glued together.”

11. Reframing – try to see the problem differently. For instance, by flipping the default, analyzing the inverse of the problem instead, thinking about how you would achieve the opposite of what you want, or shifting to an opposing perspective.

Startup Example: “If we were building this company over again completely from scratch, what would we do differently in the design of our product, and can we pivot the product in that direction right now?”

Life Example: “Should move to New York to take a job that pays $20,000 more per year? Well, if I already lived in New York, the decision to stay there rather than taking a $20,000 pay cut to move here would be an easy one. So maybe I’m overly focused on the current default of not being in New York and the short term unpleasantness of relocating.”

Marketing Example: “If I were one of our typical potential customers, what would I do to try to find a product like ours?”

12. Brainstorming – set a timer for at least 5 minutes, and generate as many plausible solutions or ideas that you can without worrying about quality at all. Evaluate the ideas only at the end after the timer goes off.

Startup Example: “I’m going to set a timer for 5 minutes and come up with at least three new ways I could go about looking for a co-founder.”

Life Example: “I’m going to set a timer for 20 minutes and come up with at least five possible explanations for why I’ve been feeling so anxious lately.”

13. Experting – find an expert (or someone highly knowledgeable) in the topic area and ask their opinion about the best way to solve the problem.

Startup Example: “Why do you think most attempts at creating digital medical records failed, and what would someone have to do differently to have a reasonable chance at success?”

Computer Science Example: “What sort of optimization algorithm would be most efficient for minimizing the objective functions of this type?”

14. Eggheading – ask the smartest person you know how they would solve the problem. Be sure to send an email in advance, describing the details so that this person has time to deeply consider the problem before you discuss it.

Startup Example: “Given the information I sent you about our competitors and the interviews we’ve done with potential customers, in which direction would you pivot our product if you were me (and why)?”

Research Example: “Given the information I sent you about our goals and the fact that our previous research attempts have gotten nowhere, how would you approach researching this topic to find the answer we need?”

15. Guessing – start with a guess for what the solution could be, now check if it actually works and if not, start tweaking that guess to see if you can morph it into something that could work.

Startup Example: “I don’t know what price to use for the product we’re selling, so let me start with an initial guess and then begin trying to sell the thing, and tweak the price down if it seems to be a sticking point for customers, and tweak the price up if the customers don’t seem to pay much attention to the price.”

Math Example: “My off the cuff intuition says that this differential equation might have a solution of the form x^a * e^(b x)for some a or b, let me plug it into the equation to see if indeed it satisfies the equation for any choice of a and b, and if not, let me see if I can tweak it to make something similar work.”

Life Example: “I don’t know what the most effective diet for me would be, so I’ll just use my intuition to ban from my diet some foods that seem both unhealthy and addictive, and see if that helps.”

16. Comparing – think of similar domains you already understand or similar problems you have already solved in the past, and see whether your knowledge of those domains or solutions to those similar problems may work as a complete or partial solution here.

Life Example: “I don’t know how to find someone to fix things in my apartment, but I have found a good house cleaner before by asking a few friends who they use, so maybe I can simply use the same approach for finding a person to fix things.”

Math Example: “This equation I’m trying to simplify reminds me of work I’m familiar with related to Kullback-Leibler divergence, I wonder if results from information theory could be applied in this case.”

17. Outsourcing – consider whether you can hire someone to solve this problem, instead of figuring out how to solve it yourself.

Startup Example: “I don’t really understand how to get media attention for my company, so let me hire a public relations firm and let them handle the process.”

Life Example: “I have no fashion sense, but I’d like to look better. Maybe I should hire someone fashionable who works in apparel to go shopping with me and help me choose what I should wear.”

18. Experimenting – rapidly develop possible solutions and test them out (in sequence, or in parallel) by applying cheap and fast experiments. Discard those that don’t work, or iterate on them to improve them based on what you learn from the experiments.

Startup Example: “we don’t know if people will like a product like the one we have in mind, but we can put together a functioning prototype quickly, show five people that seem like they could be potential users, and iterate or create an entirely new design based on how they respond.”

Life Example: “I don’t know if cutting out sugar will help me lose weight or improve my energy levels, but I can try it for two weeks and see if I notice any differences.”

19. Generalizing – consider the more general case of the specific problem you are trying to solve, and then work on solving the general version instead. Paradoxically, it is sometimes easier to make progress on the general case rather than a specific one because it increases your focus on the structure of the problem rather than unimportant details.

Startup Example: “I want to figure out how to get this particular key employee more motivated to do good work, let me construct a model of what makes employees motivated to do good work in general, then I’ll apply it to this case.”

Math Example: “I want to solve this specific differential equation, but it’s clearly a special case of a more general class of differential equations, let me study the general class and see what I can learn about them first and then apply what I learn to the specific case.”

20. Approximating – consider whether a partial or approximate solution would be acceptable and, if so, aim for that instead of a full or exact solution.

Business Example: “Our goal is to figure out which truck to send out for which delivery, which theoretically depends on many factors such as current location, traffic conditions, truck capacity, fuel efficiency, how many hours the driver has been on duty, the number of people manning each truck, the hourly rate we pay each driver, etc. etc. Maybe if we focus on just the three variables that we think are most important, we can find a good enough solution.”

Math Example: “Finding a solution to this equation seems difficult, but if I approximate one of the terms linearly it becomes much easier, and maybe for the range of values we’re interested in, that’s close enough to an exact solution!”

21. Annihilating – try to prove that the problem you are attempting to solve is actually impossible. If you succeed, you may save yourself a lot of time working on something impossible. Furthermore, in attempting to prove that the problem is impossible, you may gain insight into what makes it actually possible to solve, or if it turns out to truly be impossible, figure out how you could tweak the problem to make it solvable.

Economics Example: “I’m struggling to find a design for a theoretical voting system that has properties X, Y, and Z, let me see if I can instead prove that no such voting system with these three properties could possibly exist.”

Math Example: “My goal has been to prove that this property always applies to this class of functions, let me see if I can generate a counterexample to prove that this goal is actually impossible.”

Physics Example: “I was trying to design a physical system with certain properties, but I now realize that if such a system could be realized, then it would allow for perpetual motion, and therefore it is impossible to build the sort of system I had in mind.”

22. Modeling – try to build an explicit model of the situation, including what elements there are and how they related to each other. For instance, try drawing a diagram or flow chart that encapsulates your understanding of all the important information that relates to the problem.

Life Example: “I’ve noticed that there are certain situations that cause me to freak out that would not bother other people. So what are the common elements when this happens, and how do they seem to relate to each other and to the way I end up feeling? Let me see if I can draw a diagram of this on paper.”

Startup Example: “What are all the different groups (e.g., providers, payers, patients) involved in the healthcare system, and if we diagram how they interact with each other, will that give us ideas for how we can sell our healthcare product?”

23. Brute forcing – one by one consideration of every possible solution to the problem until you’ve found a good one or exhausted them all.

Startup example: “We’re not sure the order that these four parts of the user registration process should go in, so let’s make a list of all 24 possible orderings, and examine them one by one to see which makes the most sense.”

Computer Science Example: “It’s not clear how to pick which of these machine learning methods to use on this problem, but since we have lots of data, we can just try each of the algorithms and see which makes the most accurate predictions on data we’ve held to the side for testing.”

24. Refocusing – forget about trying to solve the problem, and instead consider why you are trying to solve it. Then consider if there is a different problem you can work on that is aimed at producing the same sort of value in a different way.

Startup Example 1: “Maybe instead of trying increasingly hard to figure out how to get this type of consumer to buy, we need to switch our focus to the problem of how to sell to businesses, since what we actually care about is selling it, not selling it to one particular group.”

Startup Example 2: “I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to implement this extremely complex feature, but there are lots of features that users would find just as valuable that are much easier to implement, maybe I should focus on those instead.”

25. Sidestepping – consider whether you really want to spend more time trying to solve this problem and whether you can avoid the problem by instead working on totally different problems that you also care about.

Startup Example: “We’ve tried selling our solution to replace Excel for 12 months without much success, maybe we should go back to the drawing board and consider designing a totally new product. Our assumptions about customer needs seem to simply have been wrong.”

Math Example: “I’ve spent six months on this math problem with little progress, but there are two other math problems I’m equally excited about, so maybe I should spend some time investigating whether one of those may be more tractable.”

26. Aggregating – consider whether multiple problems you’re now experiencing might, in fact, be caused by the same source of difficulty, rather than being independent problems.

Life Example: “I seem to be having conflict with a few different friends right now – could it be that I’m doing something without realizing it that is increasing my chance of conflict with all of them?”

Business Example: “Three employees have quit in the last month. Perhaps the primary problem isn’t really about convincing this one important employee to stay, which is how I was framing it, but rather, about identifying why people keep leaving more generally.”