We've all run into a dead end while trying to figure out something, figuring out how to move forward, how to get rich, how to pass the exam and a lot more. The transition from humming along on all cylinders, rapidly closing in on the answer, to a grinding, painful crawl as our muses abandon us, and we're left quietly pounding our temples in futile frustration with nothing to show for hours of agonizing effort is often painful. Nobody enjoys that moment.
That is what this is for. There have been a few notable instances in human history where we were catapulted forward in our understanding of the universe when something significant changed in how we went about doing so, and as if we had unstopped the damn answers and information rushed in faster than they had ever rushed in before. The development of the printing press was one such instance where knowledge was suddenly easily replicated and distributed, whereas previously books were difficult to come by and only available to a select few in power.
Reading and writing became more common, and millions of people were suddenly able to pick up a copy of the Bible or protagonists and connect the teachings of the past in ways they couldn't before.
Science was an intriguing new philosophy of how to discover natural laws, and it propelled us forward and upward in our experimentation. Initially, computers were just tools for computation. However, the analytical power of computers has been instrumental in allowing us to understand things that we would not have been able to understand otherwise.
Engineering, genetics, physics, and astronomy. We could have gathered millions of data points for number crunching and simulation. The ability to manipulate and compare data on scales that a human could never access on their own has magnified our understanding thousands of times over and provided answers to questions we would never have thought to ask otherwise. Caricaturing entire historical errors in this way is extremely reductive, but it is a compelling way to think about how our collective mentality for figuring things out was shifting.
During these appeals, research, experimentation, and analysis represent three distinct modes of inquiry that feed on and reinforce each other, and which become stagnant when pursued solely without investing in the others.
Consider pedaling a bicycle with three distinct motions of your leg: up, down, back, up, down, back, up, down, back. You might exert heroic effort in one of the three motions, pushing down harder and harder to propel yourself forward. However, as you reach the apex of that motion, you will come up against the limits of what it is capable of. That doesn't mean your strength in that motion isn't adequate. It means you'll have to use one of the others to get anywhere, which means you'll lose more momentum.
The longer you wait to switch modes, the worse it will be. Aimless meandering research can be enjoyable, but without analysis, the factoids gathered are useless for constructing an answer to your question. There is no magical number of bullet points that will magically assemble them all over the world for you.
You must spend some time thinking in order to process and connect them without tying fact gathering to an ultimate goal of a trial or experiment. It's tempting to go down a thousand interesting passive inquiries that lead nowhere and can't be marshaled into a plan of action or a way forward, and you won't be able to narrow your search space by looking at the requirements or the results of your testing.
Experimentation is a great way to learn, but without first researching what's already been tried, it's easy to waste time and resources rehashing the same dead ends that hundreds have already tried or reinventing a wheel that's already been invented. Just ask the patent office how many amateur inventors are interested in trying to develop their cool new idea for getting free energy from nowhere.
You can't hone your experiments in on a more likely-to-be-fruitful area of inquiry without analyzing and mowing over your results. You're simply tinkering with variables at random and crossing your fingers that something will work. That's how evolution works. It takes a long time to decouple analysis from the other two modes of inquiry, which leads to pure thought spinning frictionlessly in the void.
You won't be able to build on any previous efforts at solving similar problems or use any of those analytical tools if you don't conduct research, making your thinking redundant and much less productive than it could be without the practical constraints of experimentation. Even the brightest people are prone to wandering off into meaningless speculation, which eventually comes crashing down when someone has the bright idea to try it out in the real world.
The cyclic nature of this type of research analysis experimentation rhythm is echoed in a variety of problem-solving techniques, but I've never seen it explicitly laid out like this. This way of thinking about the process of figuring things out has proven to be useful when I've hit a roadblock. When I'm stuck somewhere and my time and energy are dwindling, I'm burdened by two or three solid questions that refuse to go away.
It's not just a relief to switch tactics and try something new for a while, no matter how hard I try to keep doing the same thing. To make significant rapid progress, it's often the best move. I see echoes of the advantages I gain when I practice mode switching in those three periods of human history. Can you think of a time when you've used a similar strategy or a different historical example?
Lead image credits to extremenetworks.com
