Perseverance, not perseveration

I don’t know what your quest is, but I guarantee that it doesn’t have to be this difficult or dangerous. (Image credit)

Like many people, my top problem-solving activity is taking a shower.

Less effective but still very useful is a walk around the neighborhood.

There’s something about the solitude and predictability of these routines that encourages lateral thinking. It’s much better than sitting at a laptop.

In those rare situations in which the shower and the walk haven’t resolved my issue satisfactorily, my next move is to escape the bounds of this reality and slip into a different one. The easiest way to do that is to read a novel, but watching a movie, getting deeply involved in making art, or engaging in vigorous exercise can allow me to travel to a different dimension, too.

In other words, I stop trying to solve the problem and try to forget about it temporarily. It works.

If I don’t do this, I might double down on deep thinking. I might seek resources—books, courses, other media—to find the answer. I might spend my entire day walking (spending the entire day showering uses too much water). Any of these things will leave me feeling extremely drained. Refusing to let go of the problem does not help. It just drives me crazy and makes me miserable.

I don’t need to be continuously involved solving a problem in order to crack it. What matters is my commitment to keep returning to the problem after a few hours or a few days and check on it, like taking a roast out of the oven to see how it’s coming along. It’s okay if it’s not ready. I can just put it back on the rack and come back later. The solutions will emerge not as a result of perseveration, but perseverance.

There are many frameworks and formulas that are meant to help with solving certain types of problems. However, if you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before or create something that has never existed, it makes sense that there isn’t a step-by-step process already outlined for it. Usually, there’s a leap to make. A scary forest to travel through. There are unknowns and blank spaces, and it takes what it takes to explore them and fill them in. The process doesn’t alway fit a convenient schedule.

Coming up with ideas, solutions, and works of art takes iteration—and usually, iteration over time. Things might go from being bad to pretty good to great, or good to embarrassing to better. Whenever I have a sensation of pushing or forcing, I need to let it go and come back tomorrow. When I feel exhaustion or despair, I might need to wait until next week to return. In the meantime, I need to guard my energy carefully and do things that fill my cup again: enjoy the company of loved ones, escape into fictional worlds, spend time outside, move my body, play music, and so on.

It would be so nice if I could just, for instance, come up with the name for a new podcast as easily as I can check off tasks like, “file quarterly tax return” or “return books to the library.” Sometimes, it happens like that—but more often, it doesn’t. That’s fine. I can build my life around that fact and work with it instead of against it.

It may sound like I’m suggesting that you play hooky instead of doing your most important work. As a matter of fact, yes! If you have other “work” stuff to do, you can do that while your tricky problem is in the incubator, but you’re allowed to play instead. It won’t take farther away from your solution, and it just might bring you closer. At the very least, you’ll be enjoying your time instead of experiencing that excruciating sensation of trying desperately to find something that isn’t there.

When the answer shows up—it always does—you’ll be glad you didn’t stay up all night trying to wrangle a solution that didn’t quite fit, like the stepsister in Cinderella trying to smoosh her giant feet into the tiny glass slipper. You’ll be glad you waited. Of course, it didn’t feel like waiting. You were too busy having fun to notice.