Question Your Way Around a Puzzle

The most ingenious ideas, especially those that mark a breakthrough in history, emerge as insights from incisive questions.

Take the history of philosophy, for example. Today, we take for granted concepts like the good, virtue, and justice. Whatever our disagreements about their meaning (and we certainly have them), our highest moral notions and aspirations are shaped around these ideas.

But it wasn’t always obvious what the good, virtue, and justice per se meant. It wasn’t even obvious that we needed to ask those questions in the first place. It took one curious man to raise them in the minds of his peers (whom he irritated to the point of tiredness), thus changing forever the way we think about our lives.

Such is the story of Socrates. And such is, indeed, the pattern of all progress in science and innovation.

Whatever values we enjoy today — whether it is knowledge, technology, or anything that gives us high pleasure and comfort — was first conceived as a problem. Before reaching their effective solutions, innovators of all stripes had to first formulate the right questions to ask themselves and to have everyone else around them reflecting deeply.

As Albert Einstein once said: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

Next time you can’t come up with good ideas, think about their example. Maybe you feel like you need more preparation to proceed. Maybe you can’t see a way around the issue. That much was also true of Socrates, Einstein, and every other pioneer in their fields. What set them apart — and what can help you reach creative solutions for your own problems — was to learn how to approach the puzzle freshly, with questions that opened up new perspectives and a whole new world to discover.

By Ricardo Pinto

Ricardo is a Content Writer and Creator at Novel Philosophy Academy