I’ve always hated puzzles. Whenever my teachers or any of my parents presented me with something like this:
I’d crawl in my skin. Puzzles to me consist of:
- A deterministic whole formed by known multiple pieces
- A clear end goal or result
- Rules on how to get from point A to point B
- It’s a logical, clear cut type of activity
Why did I hate them:
- I’m particularly terrible at remembering rules — ask anyone who has played board games with me
- The path to the solution was not intuitive
- They were too abstract and detached from reality
- The format and the process wasn’t fun to me
Hating puzzles is a problem because:
- Life is a series of problems to be solved within constraints
- Our jobs and education are oriented on getting from point A to point B through a series of formulaic steps
- Solving problems may have less impact on their target than the impact they actually have on your life e.g. your degree or your job
Hating puzzles is a problem because society determines your worth by how good you can solve them.
I tasked myself to debunk my assumptions on what I’ve been taught puzzles are. Here are some examples:
- Myth: A deterministic whole formed by known multiple pieces
Real problems in life have uncertainty. The whole changes with time, and the pieces are moving.
For the longest time, academia believed that the left and right sides of the brain had deterministic behavior. Nowadays, we know that our brains activate different regions based on what they’re performing.
In other words, you can never know everything about the puzzle you want to solve. Yet you still attempt to solve it, learning new things in the process.
- A clear end goal or result
Real problems never end up as planned. The end goal or result is a combination of factors within your control and factors outside your control.
- Rules on how to get from point A to point B
There are multiple ways to solve the puzzle. The environment in which real problems and situations play entitle a complexity we just can’t fathom. But it’s this multiplicity that gives us free room to go to many places and experiment new things, finding a reasonable path in the process.
For the longest time, the predefined path to creating content such as film was charted by Hollywood. Nowadays, we see a slew of creators creating content in media through different paths: YouTube, TikTok, etc.
- It’s a logical, clear cut type of activity
There are different types of puzzles, varying by the process they follow or the material they use. Puzzles can involve pictures, music, movement and processes that aren’t numbers or steps. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but they’re just not for me. Puzzles can also involve people.
Puzzles impacting people were the ones that challenged my assumptions the most.
Through collaboration with different people, my academic background and my empathy, I’ve tackled problems such as environmental policy, child care and education, and most recently organize the world’s information so as to enable improvement in the lives of other people.
Now I don’t hate puzzles as much !
