How Bill Gates Approaches Problem Solving: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Obtaining the proper responses is essential, but success can also be realized by asking the ideal issues.
Take Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher, who regularly requested himself one particular issue: “Will this (conclusion) make Southwest Airways the small-value service provider?” Or Steve Employment, who regularly asked one query: “How several instances did you say no today?”
Include Bill Gates to the record. According to the most modern submit on his GatesNotes blog:
Ever because I was a teenager, I’ve tackled just about every significant new challenge the same way: by commencing off with two queries. I employed this system at Microsoft, and I nevertheless use it these days. I talk to these issues practically every single week about Covid-19.
Right here they are: Who has dealt with this challenge nicely? And what can we study from them?
We all have a tendency to perform and reside in self-made boundaries. We do the kinds of points we generally do. We read through the kinds of guides we ordinarily browse. We interact with the kind of individuals we commonly interact with. In the procedure, we understand a little additional about the matters we now know. That feels like development.
But what if you step outside your self-produced boundaries? What if you decide to go where you ordinarily never go, and do what you normally really don’t do?
That, in a nutshell, is the Gates solution. If you want to solve a big challenge or realize a substantial goal, do not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel.
Locate a great wheel you can adopt for by yourself
When I worked in e book producing, I was part of a group that toured a nearby Coors bottling plant. We came away with more productivity improvement suggestions than we could carry out in a yr.
The facility was outstanding, but it can be not like Coors was accomplishing incredible points. They had been just doing different — to us — things.
We realized what we knew. But we failed to know what they knew, and that we could utilize those people matters to make ourselves even greater.
I’ve experienced plenty of identical activities. I went driving with professional mountain biker Jeremiah Bishop and learned more about cycling in 30 minutes than I experienced learned in the prior yr. I labored out with FitnessGenes co-founder and CEO Dr. Dan Reardon and discovered extra about lifting in that hour than I had acquired more than yrs of trying to gain power and dimensions. Talking with Navy SEAL Ray Treatment entirely improved how I think about perseverance and determination, even though after accomplishing 100,000 pushups, I imagined I presently knew a lot about how to remain the study course.
The very same has transpired to you. You have fulfilled individuals who absolutely altered your point of view. You have study guides that built you feel in different ways about your everyday living, no matter whether skillfully or individually. You’ve got gone areas, and carried out matters you generally would not do, that produced you a smarter and better man or woman.
Yet we really don’t actively look for out those people experiences.
Consider a site from the Gates playbook. As an alternative of hoping to brainstorm your way to a new answer to a challenge or a new course of action to obtain a purpose, talk to you two queries:
“Who has dealt with this challenge very well? And what can I master from them?”
The most effective way to resolve a issue or attain a intention is to uncover folks who have basically solved that difficulty or achieved that intention. Get started from the close, the alternative or accomplishment, and then function backward.
That tactic is the terrific equalizer, mainly because you is not going to require to be unusually inventive. Or unusually smart. Or unusually connected, or educated, or rich.
You just have to have to be willing to glimpse, and examine, and then folllow the measures and approach you learn.
Finest of all, you may follow that process knowing — in its place of hoping — that your really hard perform will pay out off.
Because what works for other people can certainly get the job done for you.