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The Nature of Problems - Part 1

So far we have covered some of the basic fundamentals about creative people—what types of personality characteristics they exhibit; what mental factors can inhibit their problem-solving abilities; and the ways in which they approach, generally, the job of solving a problem. This chapter is concerned largely with what the shooting is all about—or at!—fundamentals of problems them­selves.

It is a common occurrence in business, or in your personal liv­ing, to meet up with a major problem that only you can solve and immediately begin to experience a feeling of being very much alone in the world. It seems as though this is the very worst prob­lem anyone has ever had to face; or that there has, at least, never been anything quite like it before. The next mental short circuit leads you to the frustrating feeling that, since you yourself have never faced this before and neither has anyone else, you are cer­tainly not equipped to cope with it. It is an impossible situation, and why waste your time on it?

These "feelings" we experience probably inhibit our problem-solving abilities more than any other type of block. And they are completely false and misleading.

A man who suddenly finds himself in marital difficulties, with a divorce threatening, can easily go to pieces because of his inabil­ity to cope with this completely new emotional experience—new to him, that is. For when he finally gets around to seeing a divorce lawyer, he will find several very thick books detailing case after case just as bad as—or worse than—his.

The engineer frequently struggles in a mental aloneness with a peculiar design problem that may take months to solve. During this time he can become embittered, frustrated, and lose a great deal of his self-confidence. But finally, he produces his idea and it works. And a week later, a competitive design embodying many of the same problems and similar solutions is on the market. It is only then that the engineer realizes that he was not alone—that somewhere else another lonely man was also suffering the same emotional strain because of the same problem.

The industrial salesman may work over a particularly difficult prospect for months, or years, feeling all the while that this account is unique—nothing anyone else in the company has ever had any experience with is going to help him. He may even confirm this feeling by talking to other members of the sales force, actively seek­ing their help, and finding that they do not, indeed, have any sug­gestions to offer. But what the salesman is apt to forget is that somebody is now selling that account. And somebody is actively coping with the problems, whether they are personalities, price, quality, or supply. The problem is being solved so far as the customer is concerned, and so far as that customer is concerned, there is really no problem. This brings us to one of the first funda­mentals you should know about problems: Man makes his own problems.

Related terms include managing business and business government grant money small.