Though it’s obviously important to put the hours in to understand your subject (the brain can only work with what it’s given), a creative or insightful solution arises from those pseudo-random mental firings that are beyond our conscious control. The answer to a hard problem might be a mental path that your brain hasn’t formed yet, making trying to think your way through to it a fruitless endeavor. At a certain point, it’s important to step back, relax, and let your subconscious create more grist for the mill
I’ve got mixed opinions on this. On the one hand, I agree that thinking “harder” doesn’t do anything directly useful, even if it maybe primes later useful thoughts. I even agree that creating anything genuinely new is heavily dependent on coincidence, in the sense that accidents can shorten a search in ways that intentional searching cannot.
However, on the other hand, it’s also clear that failure to solve problems or get good ideas is very often a failure to consciously ask the right questions of your subconscious. A lot of times, the thing stopping people is that they simply haven’t bothered to ask their brains for a solution in the first place… or that, having asked, they don’t keep System 2 quiet enough to prevent verbal overshadowing of the search results coming back from System 1. (i.e., the real reason why brainstorming isn’t supposed to include criticism.)
I’ve got mixed opinions on this. On the one hand, I agree that thinking “harder” doesn’t do anything directly useful, even if it maybe primes later useful thoughts. I even agree that creating anything genuinely new is heavily dependent on coincidence, in the sense that accidents can shorten a search in ways that intentional searching cannot.
However, on the other hand, it’s also clear that failure to solve problems or get good ideas is very often a failure to consciously ask the right questions of your subconscious. A lot of times, the thing stopping people is that they simply haven’t bothered to ask their brains for a solution in the first place… or that, having asked, they don’t keep System 2 quiet enough to prevent verbal overshadowing of the search results coming back from System 1. (i.e., the real reason why brainstorming isn’t supposed to include criticism.)