What solving puzzles can teach you about work, and life

The legendary music producer Quincy Jones has a saying: “I don’t have problems. I have puzzles.”

I love this quote. I want to tattoo it on my forehead. ?

I call Jones’s philosophy the Puzzler Mindset, and I find it incredibly effective. ?If I look at life and business as a series of puzzles instead of problems, I’m both more productive and happier.

Problems are fear-inducing and intractable. Puzzles are solvable, motivating, and engage your creative and playful side. ?

I became a convert after spending three years of a deep dive into the delightful and eccentric world of puzzlemakers and solvers for my new book, The Puzzler.?

I interviewed Garry Kasparov about chess puzzles. I competed with my family as Team USA in the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship. And I visited the headquarters of the CIA to wrestle with one of the great unsolved puzzles of the world.?

But more than that, I interviewed dozens of scientists, psychologists and business experts about the greater meaning of puzzles.?

My finding: The mindset you need to be a good puzzle solver is helpful, even crucial, when confronting challenges in business and life. It’s helpful to reframe a daunting problem as an enticing puzzle.

There are dozens of strategies I’ve learned from puzzles, but here are a few of my favorites:?

Chop your problem down into bits

One of the best strategies for solving puzzles is to chop the big puzzle into a series of smaller puzzles. Consider Fermi Problems, a type of logic problem that Google and Microsoft famously ask at some job interviews.

A typical Fermi Problem goes like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” You have to estimate the size of something about which you are totally ignorant.

David Epstein talks about how to solve Fermi problems in his excellent book Range. If you just take a wild, off-the-cuff guess, you’ll probably be wrong by orders of magnitude.

Instead, break it down. As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?”

You won’t guess it exactly, but you’ll be much more likely to be in the ballpark. “None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer,” Epstein says. He calls it an important tool in his “conceptual Swiss Army knife.”

I use this strategy when approaching most problems, even the puzzle of writing my books. If I visualize my task as one monolithic book, I feel overwhelmed. Instead, I break it down into a series of chapters, and see it as a sequence of smaller puzzles. Tackle parts instead of the whole.

Or take the puzzle of how I can get myself to walk the treadmill for a few minutes a day. If I say to myself, “You have to walk on the treadmill for an hour today,” I will delay this task forever. So I break it down. I put the big picture out of my mind. First, I tackle the subgoal of putting on my sneakers. I can do that. Then the subgoal of turning the treadmill on. I can do that. And just step onto the rubber belt for just five minutes. I can do that. And eventually, I’m walking and realize this isn’t so bad. I can do this. I stay on for the full hour.

Turn it upside down ?

Sometimes, the best solutions come when you turn the problem upside down or backwards.?You can see this play out in many puzzles, such as this one:?

There’s a man in a room. The walls are cement and the floor is dirt. The only opening is a locked door and a skylight. The man has a shovel and starts to dig. He knows it’s impossible to tunnel out, but continues to dig anyway. Why??

As solvers, many of us are focused on the man digging a hole. But he’s also doing the opposite: He’s building a hill out of dirt. And he will climb the hill and get out through the skylight.?

Reversing your thinking is an incredibly powerful tool in life and business. It has spawned everything from the assembly line (what if the car parts move to workers, instead of workers moving to the car parts?) to the brilliant upside-down Heinz ketchup bottle (What if the spout were on the bottom instead of the top, eliminating the need for thumping the bottle?).

I have a friend who uses an upside-down approach to pitching his businesses. He’ll start his presentations with five reasons why his business won’t work – and then rebut each one. This may not work for everyone, but it certainly grabs attention and shows confidence.

Be supremely flexible ?

Perhaps the most powerful weapon in a puzzler’s arsenal is cognitive flexibility. Good puzzlers don’t fall in love with their hypotheses. They keep their beliefs provisional, open to new evidence. They embrace the pencil eraser and the delete key.?

Almost every puzzle I tackled required this. For instance, British newspapers run crosswords that are much trickier than American crosswords. They involve devious wordplay. I remember being baffled by one clue: “Gegs”?

That was the whole clue, just those four letters. I figured it was the plural of the word “geg.” But what does “geg” mean? I even resorted to Google, and found it was the airport symbol for Portland. I got nowhere.?

It was only after I took a break and let go of my certainty that the answer came to me.

The answer is “scrambled eggs.”

I had to let go of my hypothesis. I had to embrace the idea that I might be wrong. This is the hallmark of my favorite thinkers. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, “being wrong is the only way I feel sure I learned anything.”

It’s why so many successful businesses started with a completely different premise. Welch’s grape juice started as a way to sell non-alcoholic communion wine during Prohibition. Only when that failed did they switch to grape juice as a sweet treat for kids. The messaging software Slack started as an internal tool for a video game before the founders realized it had more potential than the game itself.

Pause before solving

There’s a famous story about 18th century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. He was nine years old when a teacher gave his class the following assignment:?

Add up all the whole numbers between 1 and 100.?

Gauss raised his hand after about 10 seconds.?

And the teacher was shocked and disbelieving. But Gauss had done the problem correctly.?

How??He avoided the default strategy. The first strategy most people think of is to start adding. 1 plus 2 plus 3 and so on.? ?

Gauss realized, there’s a better method: Look for pairs.

If you add up 1 and 100, that’s 101.?

And 2 plus 99, that’s also 101.?

And 3 plus 98.?

Each pair is 101. There are 50 pairs. So it’s 50 times 101, which is 5050.?Much easier.

Gauss’s solution is a great metaphor for all kinds of problems. Don’t immediately dive into solving mode with the first strategy that pops into your head. Step back and give some thought to meta-strategy. What is the goal? Is there a better method to arrive there? As mathematician and author Marcus du Sautoy writes in Thinking Better, shortcuts are not necessarily a bad thing. You need to look at the end goal, and work backwards from there.

Without this type of thinking, your streaming services would be significantly slower. Coders have figured out that you can compress files by looking at the end goal: An accurate image. You don’t need to represent every single pixel in the code. If part of the image is the same color, you can represent that entire section in one line of code. A great shortcut.

Look for unexpected links

A lot of puzzle-solving involves looking for unexpected links between two pieces. It could be two jigsaw pieces that initially look incompatible. Or it could be a word puzzle about what NFL quarterbacks and Catholic priests have in common. (The answer: Hail Marys). ?

I look for unexpected links whenever I have a business project. Consider marketing my books: I once wrote a book called “The Year of Living Biblically” about obeying all the rules of the Bible. I wanted my book to appear in every possible publication, from religious websites to women’s magazines. But what is the link between a woman’s magazine and the Bible?

I looked at my book from every possible angle until I found a connection: The Bible does have some racy parts celebrating young love, especially “The Song of Solomon.” So, I pitched an article on “Sex Advice from the Bible” to Glamour magazine, and they printed it. That’s 2 million readers I would normally not have reached.

Find the pattern?

What is special about the number 8,549,176,320?

Spoiler below.

The answer is that, when written out, these numbers appear in alphabetical order.?

If you did solve this, chances are you noticed the pattern only after trying many different options. Trial and error is key to spotting patterns, and spotting patterns is key to many successful businesses, especially in the age of big data.?

You’ve no doubt heard the stories of Moneyball and baseball. But I prefer another puzzle-like example from the world of horse racing, which Seth Stephens-Davidowitz discusses in his big data book Everybody Lies.

He writes of a former financial analyst-turned-horseracing consultant named Jeff Seder. When trying to find fast horses, Seder looked for every possible correlation, from bigger nostrils to longer legs. He finally noticed that horses whose hearts have big left ventricles were often brilliant racers. Using this method, he spotted the Triple Crown winner American Pharoah as a young horse and helped his client earn millions.

See the world from other perspectives

One of the most famous – and difficult – logic puzzles ever created centers on an island with blue-eyed, green-eyed and brown-eyed people. The only way to solve this puzzle is to adopt the perspective of the islanders.

You have to switch between the perspectives of the green-eyed castaway, the brown-eyed castaway, and the blue-eyed castaway. You have to consider what each islander knows, and – even more important -- what they know the other islanders know.

This type of thinking is crucial to Game Theory and is referred to as “Common Knowledge.” It requires you to step into another person’s shoes. Or several people’s shoes. It’s another absolutely crucial skill, in life and business.?

As a writer, I have to step into the shoes of my readers. What do they want to read? What do they know? I have to try to forget my own biases and adopt what psychology professor Steven Pinker calls “the beginner’s mind.”

If you’re a product designer, you need to get inside the mind of your user. See the world from the consumer’s eyes or better yet, test it out yourself for as long as you can.

Of course, not every strategy I’ve written about will work for every problem. But that’s a good meta-puzzle: Figuring out which solving strategy goes best with which problems. The only way to crack this puzzle is trial and error, one of the keys to the Puzzler Mindset.?