Do your “aha moments” come when you’re focused on the problem or focused elsewhere?
I come to “aha moments” in three ways.
(1) In many creative situations, I find the solution by iteration. I experiment, I find a good-enough solution, and then I continue experimenting and improving until I’m satisfied. Direct focus until the solution is acceptable.
The challenge with this is it’s like brute force methods of hacking a password. It can take a loooong time and be really tedious.
(2) In other situations, I hit the solution when I’m thinking about other things. The other day I realized a better solution to a problem I had had on a campout a month earlier. I wasn’t thinking about the problem, the solution just appeared. I think those situations happen when we can clear our minds of the noise. I don’t have these “aha moments” when I’m listening to a podcast or a record – or if I do, I discover I didn’t take in any of what I was allegedly listening to.
The challenge with this is that you can’t time them out. The solutions come at inconvenient times, like at bedtime, or a month after the problem went away.
And then there’s a third, surprising category.
(3) The answer comes immediately. As soon as a problem is presented, I see the answer with no intermediate steps or conscious thought. I think this is actually a version of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink – a lifetime of solving similar problems lets you arrive at the solution without apparent effort.
The challenge with this is that it can be hard to reverse engineer the reasoning or justification for colleagues. And without the reasoning, it can be hard to get other people on board with the solution. There’s more work to do after you know the answer. (Like showing your work in a long algebra problem you already know the answer to…)