Wishful Thinking Is The Secret Solution To Life’s Trickiest Problems
By: Mordecai Ayuz
Tags: Life Lessons, Productivity, Leadership, Problem Solving, Careers

This version of wishful thinking would help you find your career, let go of fear and live your dream life.

Photo:Kazi Mizan/Unsplash

Many life’s problems that affect us every day seem to defy answer. A common one many people grapple with is: what should be my career?

A lot has been written about finding your dream career or doing what you love or following your passion, yet many people are still lost about exactly what to do.

There’s a question that works, however. A question that gives you an inroad into an otherwise intractable problem. It’s one question that the smartest career guides and counsellors have learnt to ask. You’ll find this question now in the most helpful career guides.

Finding the right balance of using a finite amount of time, with a finite amount of resources (mostly, money) to craft a career and make a living from it has understandably had many of us tied up in knots.

It’s almost like we never get the right answer. Even when we do — based on the facts we have — we still doubt if we’re really doing what we should be doing with our lives.

This question, however, throws the limitation of time and financial resources away, and ask something a little different.

It goes thus:

If you had all the time and money in the world [you want], what would you do? What career would you pick up?

The magic of this question is not its possibility, in fact, it’s an unrealistic scenario, but that’s kind of the point. And that’s why it’s worked so well, for many people to get clear about what they want to do.

Take the example of Esther, a 20-year old, school-drop out, that finally got clear and figured out what she wanted to do with her life, after being asked this question and taking time to think about it.

Here’s another one that’s often asked when someone is sensing you know what to do, but you’re letting fear hold you back goes thus. It goes to the bottom of revealing what is often really holding us back from living out our dreams:

“What Would You Attempt to Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?” What would you do if failure wasn’t an option?

Building Your Castle In The Air

In the first example, because many people think the biggest roadblock is time or money. So, if these constraints were relaxed or were to completely disappear, what would you do? The second example, gets to the bottom of answering the question, what would you do if nothing could stop you?

There is a pattern to this provocative but very useful questions that have the power to tease out what you seem muddled about. You may have noticed it already.

We take a problem with constraints, then kick out the constraint and see if we can answer the problem without the constraint. There’s a name for this in science. It’s called relaxation.

There are many times when we are up against a thorny, gnarly, impassable problem that just seems to defy our best effort. Our options are stark either/or choices with no middle ground.

The examples above show one of the most popular uses of relaxation, also called constraint relaxation, which simply removes some of the constraints on a problem and makes progress on a looser form of the problem before coming back to reality.

Think of it as building your castle in the air first, then coming back down to put a foundation beneath it.

Continuous Relaxation

Another form of relaxation is to imagine you already have a blend of the two options you want to choose from. They already both exist in your life.

Imagine this as deciding between iced tea and lemonade. First, imagine a 50–50 “Arnold Palmer” blend and then round it up or down.

Imagine you have to round it up to iced tea, and delete lemonade, or imagine reducing iced tea to zero leaving only the lemonade and see how both feel. This gives you a big clue as to which matters more.

Possibilities Into Penalties

The third, Lagrangian Relaxation, turns impossibilities into mere penalties, teaching the art of bending the rules (or breaking them and accepting the consequences).

A rock band deciding which songs to cram into a limited set, for instance, is up against what computer scientists call the knapsack problem — a puzzle that asks one to decide which of a set of items of different build and importance to pack into a confined volume.

In its strict formulation, a knapsack problem is famously intractable, but that needn’t discourage our relaxed rock stars.

As demonstrated in several celebrated examples, sometimes it’s better to simply play a bit past the city curfew and incur related fines that to limit the show to the available slot. In fact, even when you don’t commit the infraction, simply imagining it can be illuminating.

To Sum Up

As an optimization technique, relaxation is all about being consciously driven by wishful thinking.

So when you have a problem that seems intractable, an either-or choice that’s hard to make, suspend reality and use wishful thinking, solve the new freedom-fused problem wishful thinking gives you, and things get clearer when you return to reality.

In other words, wishful thinking can be useful. Make your castle in the air, then build foundations under them.

Unless we're willing to spend all our lives striving for unattainable perfection every time we encounter a hitch, hard problems demand that instead of spinning our wheels, we imagine easier versions and tackle those first.

When applied correctly, this is not just wishful thinking, not fantasy or idle daydreaming. It’s one of our best ways of making progress.