Can't solve problems with same thinking, when we created them

You’re headed in the right direction—you admit to having problems and have a desire to correct them. Most of us can’t wrap our heads around accepting responsibility for our actions while suffering the consequences. It’s so much easier to point the finger of blame at an external source. As to the same level of thinking—hmmm, maybe you’re talking about using the same level of energy to solve your problems. That’s good; it takes lots of energy, bravery, and honesty to look at our part, however unpleasant. If you can free yourself and look objectively (take another perspective—maybe another person’s viewpoint) you may find that using the same level of thinking is what led you astray in the first place.

Let’s think differently by examining our motivations, our desire and wants. We are all conditioned in today’s society to react, not to step back to think, and then respond. But (a big but here) we can’t lay all the blame on current society. We all make choices, some good, some bad, and some really horrible! So, it makes good sense to examine why we made those decisions, how they impacted other decisions that followed, and how that particular line of thinking led us to this unhappy state of affairs. I call it “walking back the dog.” (That’s my term because I’m guilty of making an amazingly large number of mistakes in my life, too.)

I hope this makes some sense. I’ve managed to create a decent-sized island of happiness and serenity in a stormy sea of my own problems by looking at my part in situations. I bet you can too. And thanks for the question. I could use a dose of my own medicine even now! So what exactly is problem solving? Within the context of competitive exams problem solving is simply the tendency to reproduce an accurate solution within a short duration of time. This will usually be a consequence of several hours of training.

But in the real world (which Einstein talks about), problem solving is about discovering a solution to a novel problem which does not have an answer key. A situation where the act of solving the problem will fundamentally introduce a new piece of knowledge to the world. And thus not knowing the solution itself signifies that one's thinking was wrong as it was that train of thoughts which lead to the problem's definition. Think about a problem as a complete representation of its solution.

Moreover, if the problem is “why does light seem to travel the same distance within a fixed time regardless of what frame of reference it was observed in?” this question itself is the consequence of the answers which are, time dilation and length contraction. This shows that a question about light (induced by a thinking of one type) required you to think about space-time and its relativistic effects which were completely different from your original thoughts, which were about light.

A?bit of in-depth research on this says that he did not say these exact words, but he did speak along these lines. Interestingly, when he did, he was not speaking abstractly, but speaking of the need for a new ethical perspective arising in and from the human heart and leading to a post-nationalist, post-militarist society because war could not protect us in a world where nations possess atomic weapons. Einstein himself was asked if he said this, or something like it, and he clarified his thoughts. This is the report on the topic from Albert Einstein - Wikiquote: The first paragraph here is not cited with specifics; it only says that he said this in the 1940s so we do not know whether these were his exact words: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Cheers!