IT’S NATURAL TO GUESS, AND YOU CAN STOP

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the brightest talent in the world fresh out of universities such as MIT, Cornell, Queens, Oxford, and Cambridge. These graduates are brilliant young people and most have technical degrees of some sort that make them very familiar with solving problems. They have a deep scientific foundation. They’ve synthesized complex chemicals and built robots. But when they’re faced with their first hard practical problem, I’ve found that they all guess and flail. But once they recognize how the compulsion to guess inhibits progress, they can handle hard problems with panache.

Great problem-solvers resist the temptation to guess at every stage of the process. Guessing is a tough habit to break, so get started!