The Thing About Revisiting Problems Is That the Problems Have Also Been Revisiting You

The guy ahead of me at the hardware store was buying a single hinge. Just one. Brass, standard size, nothing remarkable about it. And he was asking the clerk, with what I can only describe as genuine anguish, whether this particular hinge was "the right one," whether it would "hold up," whether perhaps there was a better hinge somewhere else in the store or, conceivably, in some other store altogether. The clerk, a woman in her fifties with the bearing of someone who has answered nine thousand hinge-related questions and will answer nine thousand more before she retires, told him it was a good hinge. He said he understood it was a good hinge, but was it the right hinge. She said it was the right hinge. He looked at it in his palm the way you'd look at a pregnancy test.¹ I stood there with my own basket (caulk, a pack of picture-hanging hooks, a replacement filter I'd been meaning to buy for three months) and I realized I was watching a man try to get certainty from a hinge. And I understood this, completely, because I have spent enormous portions of my adult life trying to get certainty from things that cannot provide it.

The hinge guy and I share a particular affliction, which is the belief there is a right way to begin anything, and if you haven't found it yet, you should probably keep looking. This is, on its surface, a reasonable-sounding instinct. It wears the costume of diligence. But underneath it is something more complicated, something closer to a very sophisticated form of standing still.² Because the search for the right starting point, the correct approach, the optimal first step, turns out to be one of the most reliable methods ever devised for never actually starting at all.

There's an old distinction I keep coming back to, one I first heard from a woodworker I met (a guy named Dale who builds furniture in his garage in Sparks, Nevada and who has the hands of someone who has done real physical work for a long time). Dale said the difference between an amateur and a master isn't what you'd think. The amateur, he said, doesn't know what to do. Reasonable enough. But the master? The master knows what not to do. Which, when Dale said it, sounded both obvious and not obvious at all, in the way the most useful observations tend to. The amateur stands in front of the lumber and sees infinite possibilities and is paralyzed by them. The master stands in front of the same lumber and has already eliminated ninety percent of the options, and this elimination, this strategic narrowing, is itself the skill.³

I have been thinking about this distinction for weeks now, because I think it applies to something bigger than woodworking, something about how we approach the general project of becoming a person who is slightly better at being alive than they were last year.⁴ There's a whole industry built on the premise that what you need is more: more strategies, more frameworks, more morning routines, more information about neuroplasticity and dopamine and the optimal window for deep work. And I don't think any of this is wrong, exactly. I think most of it is fine. But I also think it caters to the amateur's problem, which is a lack of knowing what to do, when the real problem, the one that gets less attention because it's less marketable, is an overabundance of doing without sufficient refusal.

Let me put it a different way.⁵ William James, the psychologist and philosopher, wrote in 1890 about what he called "the stream of consciousness," this flowing, tumbling, never-quite-still quality of human thought. And one of the things he observed, which I find myself returning to with increasing frequency, is his notion of selective attention as the very foundation of mind. James argued it is only through our capacity to ignore, to select some inputs and suppress others, that anything coherent emerges from the flood of sensation and thought we experience in any given moment. He wrote this while producing a twelve-hundred-page book, The Principles of Psychology (which itself might have benefited from more selective attention).⁶ But the point stands. Maybe the most generative thing a person can do is get better at saying no to things, at closing doors, at recognizing which hinge you don't need.

Which brings me to wandering, and how it is not the same as being lost.

There is a line I've been turning over, a formulation so compact I almost dismissed it on first contact: "To learn, wander. To achieve, focus." And my initial reaction was something the impatient intellectual part of me produces reflexively, which was: yes, fine, obviously. The kind of thing you'd see on a motivational poster in a dentist's office.⁷ But then I kept thinking about it, and the thing I kept thinking was: what makes this less obvious than it sounds is the implied sequence. You don't pick one. You do both, but in order. First wandering. Then focusing. And the wandering isn't a failure of focus. It's the precondition for focus. You have to have explored widely before you can narrow wisely. You have to have picked up and put down many hinges before you know which one belongs in your palm.

This maps onto something psychologists have studied under the somewhat clinical name of the incubation effect, which was first formally described by Graham Wallas in 1926 as part of his four-stage model of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, verification. The incubation period, the part where you stop thinking about the problem and go do something else, turns out to be the part where an enormous amount of the actual work gets done. Your conscious mind steps aside.⁸ Your subconscious, freed from the tyranny of deliberate effort, begins making associations and connections you would never arrive at through brute-force thinking. Researchers have found incubation substantially increases the odds of solving a problem, and the effect benefits from long incubation periods with low cognitive workloads. Which is a technical way of saying: take walks. Stare out windows. Let your mind do what your mind does when you're not bossing it around.

I think about this when I consider my own patterns of problem-solving, which (I am being honest here) tend toward the obsessive-grinding model. I encounter a thing I need to figure out and I sit down and I throw myself at it, and when I don't solve it immediately I throw myself at it harder, the way you'd try to open a jar, just more grip, more force, more sitting at the desk.⁹ And what I've noticed, over years of this, is that the solution almost never comes during the throwing. It comes later. Walking the dogs. In the shower. Making coffee. In the space between effort and the return to effort. This tension, this open loop, is not just an annoyance. It's the mechanism by which your mind keeps processing in the background. It's the engine of the incubation effect.

So the wandering is not wasted time. The wandering is the time important stuff is secretly getting done.

I should say, parenthetically, that this is not a justification for aimlessness, or for never finishing anything, or for calling your Netflix habit "incubation."¹⁰ There's a real and meaningful difference between wandering with a question in your pocket and just drifting. The question matters. The preparation matters. Wallas's first stage is preparation, not incubation. You have to have put in the work, engaged with the material, felt the friction of not-yet-understanding, before the stepping-away becomes productive. Incubation without preparation is just procrastination with better PR.

But here's what I keep getting stuck on (and I promise this connects). There's a French poet named Jules Laforgue, a Symbolist who died in 1887 at twenty-seven, who wrote a line in one of his poems that has been following me around for weeks the way a song gets stuck in your head. The line, translated, goes something to the effect of: how picturesque do those trains later seem to us that we failed to catch.¹¹ And I realize this sounds, initially, a sort of wistful observation about missed opportunities. But I think Laforgue is getting at something sharper. The trains we didn't catch are the ones we romanticize. The paths not taken are the ones we paint in golden light. And this happens not because those trains were actually going somewhere better, but because our imagination, freed from the constraints of what actually happens when you board a train and ride it to its destination, fills in the gaps with something luminous.

This is, I think, one of the most quietly destructive habits of the human mind: the tendency to romanticize the unlived life.¹² Because the life you didn't live is always, by definition, more attractive than the one you did, since it never had to survive contact with reality. Every book you didn't write is a masterpiece. Every career you didn't pursue was the one you were meant for. Every hinge you didn't buy was the perfect hinge. And so you can spend your whole life standing at the platform, watching trains pull away, and the accumulated beauty of all those departing trains becomes, itself, a kind of comfort, a way of feeling that your life is full of possibility even as you stand there, unmoving, surrounded by gorgeous potential you have no intention of converting into anything actual.

I say this not to be harsh about it, but because I recognize it in myself so completely that describing it feels autobiographical.¹³ There was a period, not too long ago, when I was collecting ideas for things I wanted to build, projects I wanted to start, skills I wanted to develop. I had lists. I had notes. I had folders organized by category. I had a whole architecture of intention. And what I did not have was any of the things themselves, because I was too busy curating the possibility space to actually let it collapse it into something specific. The amateur's problem: too many options, not enough elimination. Too much wandering without the pivot to focus.

What finally shifted things (and I'm still not sure I understand why, or whether I can explain it in a way that would be useful to anyone else, which is always the worry when you try to describe these kinds of turns) was a period when I came back to a problem I'd been thinking about, on and off, for months. Not a single problem, exactly, but a cluster of questions about what I was actually trying to accomplish, what the work was for, why I kept circling the same themes without landing on any of them. And when I came back to it this particular time, something had clarified. Not dramatically. Not in a flash of insight. More the way fog lifts, gradually, and you realize you can see the outlines of the road you've been walking on the whole time.

There's a formulation I've heard attributed (probably loosely) to Lao Tzu, from the Tao Te Ching, which goes something to the effect of: when you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.¹⁴ And what struck me about this, what made it stick, was not the part about respect. Respect from others is fine, obviously, but it's a byproduct, not a goal, and treating it as a goal tends to corrode the very quality it's supposed to reflect. What struck me was the first part: content to be simply yourself. Because this is, I think, the destination the wandering eventually leads you to, if you let it. Not a strategy. Not a framework. Not a better system for managing your tasks and optimizing your output. Just a quieter form of self-knowledge, arrived at by the long route.¹⁵

And I think this is what the concept of mastery, the real version of it, not the Instagram version, actually looks like: not the accumulation of more techniques and more knowledge, but the gradual, patient stripping away of everything you don't need to carry. The master doesn't know more. The master has eliminated more. The master has looked at a hundred hinges and can walk into the store and pick up the right one without asking.

It is nearly impossible, I've come to believe, to have your best idea the first time you think about something.¹⁶ The good ideas come later. They come on the second pass, the fifth pass, the tenth. They come when you've lived with a question long enough for the question to change shape, to reveal aspects you couldn't have seen from your initial vantage point. Time doesn't just pass. Time works. It processes, and filters, and quietly rearranges the furniture of your understanding while you're off doing other things. The most likely way to uncover something worth knowing is to stay in proximity to the question, to keep returning to it, to let the returns accumulate.

Which I suppose is itself an argument for patience, though I want to be careful about how I frame that, because patience has become another one of those virtues people invoke without really examining what it asks of you.¹⁷ Patience is not passive. Patience, properly understood, is a form of active attention distributed over time. It's the willingness to remain in contact with something you haven't resolved yet, to resist the pull of premature certainty, to stay with the open question even when the open question makes you uncomfortable. It is, and I realize this sounds paradoxical, both a form of wandering and a form of focus, operating simultaneously.

The hinge guy left the store, by the way. He bought the hinge. The clerk, to her credit, did not rush him, did not show impatience, just let him arrive at a place where he could make the purchase. I watched him walk to his car, and he was looking at the hinge in the little paper bag, and there was something on his face I recognized, a mix of relief and residual doubt, the particular expression of someone who has committed to something while remaining unconvinced it was the right call. And I thought: yes. That. Exactly that. The willingness to buy the hinge and install it and see what happens. Not because you've achieved certainty. Because you've decided that certainty was never the thing you actually needed.

I put my caulk and my picture hooks and my long-overdue filter on the counter.¹⁸ The clerk rang me up. I did not ask if they were the right ones.

¹ I'm aware this is a slightly odd comparison but I think it's accurate. There is a specific quality of looking at a small object in your hand when that object is supposed to tell you something definitive about the future, and the hinge, in that moment, had exactly that quality. ↩︎

² There is a whole literature on what psychologists call "analysis paralysis," but I've always found the term a little too neat, a little too self-aware, to capture what actually happens. What actually happens feels less clinical than a choice between action and inaction. It feels more viscous, more immersive. You're swimming in something thick. ↩︎

³ Dale also told me, in the same conversation, that the most expensive mistake a beginning woodworker makes is buying too many tools. He said you need about five. I asked which five. He said it doesn't matter which five, as long as you learn them completely before buying a sixth. I have been thinking about this every single day since. ↩︎

⁴ Not dramatically better. Not unrecognizably transformed. Slightly. Measurably. In the way you'd notice if you were paying attention. ↩︎

⁵ I often try to put things a different way when I suspect the first way wasn't quite right, which is itself a kind of wandering, linguistically speaking. ↩︎

⁶ This is perhaps an unfair joke about a man who more or less single-handedly invented American psychology. But the book really is twelve hundred pages. Two volumes. He told his publisher it was a "loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass," which is one of the great author-to-editor self-assessments in literary history. ↩︎

⁷ The dentist's office is where wisdom goes to die. Specifically: motivational posters on the wall, Reader's Digest on the table, and a television playing daytime talk shows on the ceiling. A whole ecosystem of pre-digested thought. ↩︎

⁸ "Steps aside" is probably too polite. "Gets forcibly shoved out of the way by the much more capable unconscious mind" might be more accurate, and also more humbling. ↩︎

⁹ My wife has observed, more than once, that my approach to solving problems is indistinguishable from my approach to opening jars, which is: escalate until something gives. She is not wrong. ↩︎

¹⁰ I feel compelled to make this disclaimer because I know, from direct and recent personal experience, how easy it is to tell yourself you're "incubating" when you are in fact watching a documentary about competitive barbecue. The two states feel very similar from the inside. They are not the same. ↩︎

¹¹ The original French, from a poem called "Ô géraniums diaphanes," is "Oh, qu'ils sont pittoresques, les trains manqués." I find the French more beautiful, though I can't quite tell if that's because of the language or because things always sound more authoritative in a language you only partially understand. ↩︎

¹² The psychologist Daniel Kahneman would probably call this a variation of the peak-end rule or the availability heuristic, our tendency to evaluate experiences not by their totality but by their most vivid and most recent moments. The unlived life has only vivid moments, because they're all imagined. ↩︎

¹³ Because it is. ↩︎

¹⁴ The actual text, from the original, reads closer to something about how when one doesn't compare oneself to others, no one can compare with that person. But the paraphrase captures the spirit. And I think the spirit is what matters with texts this old; precision of translation takes you to a certain point, and then you have to let the meaning float a little. ↩︎

¹⁵ Which, okay, is its own kind of annoying, because the long route is long, and when you're on it you have no guarantee it's going anywhere. ↩︎

¹⁶ If you've ever written anything, you know this. First drafts are not the work. First drafts are the map you draw so you can figure out where you're going, and then you throw the map away and start again with the knowledge of having been lost. ↩︎

¹⁷ "Be patient" is advice that is both universally correct and universally useless. Nobody has ever heard "be patient" and thought, "Oh, I see, patience, I hadn't considered that." And yet patience is the thing. Which tells you something about the gap between knowing and doing, a gap that no amount of advice will ever fully bridge. ↩︎

¹⁸ Three months overdue, the filter. Three months of knowing I needed to replace it and not doing it. But I did it, eventually. Which counts. I think that counts. ↩︎