Every day we are faced with problems that need a solution, some have an easy solution, or at least, we do not need to think much to overcome it, but others can be a challenge and not know how to solve it.
This second type of problem is the most interesting and the one that makes you give your best, but how to do it? Many times, the problem is in how we face the problem, sometimes we focus on not knowing how to solve it or there are even times that we impose conditions that are not included in that problem and them make impossible for us to solve them.
To solve these problems we have two options, to be effective or to be efficient. The first is to solve the problem and the second is to solve it in the best possible way (or using the fewest possible resources), at first the second option may seem the best, but if we stop to analyze it better the answer may change. If we think that to be efficient you have to use the least possible number of resources, your time is also a resource so if you are going to invest a lot of time in obtaining the optimal solution you may lose that efficiency, on the other hand, you may Your solution may not be the perfect one, but it is your solution and it is the one that solves the problem and allows you to continue with the rest of your tasks.
In my opinion, being effective is better than being efficient and more for general tasks since it allows you to solve a greater number of different tasks, which today is very valuable, but to be efficient you need specialization and a lot of knowledge of the subject so It limits you to a specific topic.
After this long introduction I think I can talk about the topic of this post and it is that many times we have to solve so many problems that we have to do it automatically and we cannot stop to think of creative solutions that are different from the normal solution.
We can train ourselves in this type of thinking to solve problems in this way and that our standard solution is this type of more creative solutions, but we must always know that these solutions are not simple and that they can be strange.
To finish I would like to show you a typical exercise in this type of problem and that represents it very well so that you can try to solve it:
“The objective of this puzzle is to connect the 9 points using 4 straight lines or less without lifting the pen from the paper and without drawing the same line more than once”
