Falling in love with solution and failing to understand the problem

I’m usually inspired by great solutions to big problems. This inspiration has become a pitfall to my vision of thinking.

Behaviour

The admiration and the love I have built for certain solutions and solution patterns have got me into thinking that those solutions are the de-facto most efficient solutions for every problems i hear. I have observed that I tend to jump to the solution even without understanding the problem fully. I tend to see the problem through the lense that promotes the solution I want to implement instead of validating the solution to the actual problem

Problem with the behaviour

You will end up over-engineering, over-optimizing, solutions that you want to implement. Sometime, you might implement inefficient solutions and sometimes you might even implement really bad solutions.

Introspection: How was the behavior built in the first place

I’ve actually have formed a habit of being lazy and have let my ego take precedence over my intelligence. Understanding a problem requires you to be really interested and active in the problem that you are solving. I jump into conclusions because I am lazy to focus on the problem. I jump into conclusions because my ego says that my pre-conevied solution is the way to go.

How to avoid the behavior

1. Be mindful about this natural bias that you have built - laziness and ego
2. Learn to ask critical questions about the assumptions that you are taking when understanding a problem.

Question everything

• Is that so?
• Is it really that case?
• What are the different possibilities?
• What blindspot am I having now?
• What’s wrong with the current solutions (if present any)