本文探讨了在面对复杂问题时，如何调整心态，迎接挑战。作者指出，当我们尝试用简单方法解决问题失败后，往往会陷入困境。这时，我们需要认识到问题的复杂性，制定多步骤的计划，并接受解决过程中的困难。作者将这种转变比作“系好安全带”，强调了在面对长期、艰巨任务时，调整心态、做好准备的重要性。通过具体案例和练习，文章鼓励读者培养识别和应对复杂问题的能力，从而更有效地解决问题。

🤔 当我们面对难题时，常常会期望问题简单，试图用单一方法解决。然而，当这些方法无效时，我们容易陷入思维困境。

💡 作者建议，面对复杂问题时，应认识到问题需要多步骤解决，并做好应对过程中可能出现的困难和挫折的准备。

🧘 这种转变类似于“系好安全带”，意味着我们需要调整心态，接受长期、艰巨的任务。这包括制定计划、分步执行，并随时根据情况调整。

⏰ 作者提供了识别“系好安全带”时机的线索，例如多次尝试同一方法后仍无进展，或者对问题解决的复杂性感到意外等。

💪 文章鼓励读者通过练习，提高识别和应对复杂问题的能力，从而更有效地解决问题。一个练习是回忆过去，在遇到困难时，是如何调整心态，最终接受挑战的。

Published on July 5, 2025 1:47 AM GMT

The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts^[1].

Often, if I'm bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that'll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won't work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress.

I eventually say to myself "okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?"

And then, I realize, there's not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to 

a) make a plan, with multiple steps
b) deal with the fact that many of those steps will be annoying
and c) notice thatI'm not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have to generate more steps (itself an annoying step), and do those ones too, over and over, until it is done.

There's a lot of messy details inside the process of "figure out that plan, and continue to adjust it on the fly." But, I find the specific move of "accept that I am in a prolonged, multi-step annoying process" to be very valuable.

Before I do that, every time I run into another annoying subproblem, not only is it object-level annoying, but it feels surprising, jarring. My brain reports "unfair", even though that doesn't really make any sense.  ("What!? Again!!! ARRR! It's not supposed to be like this!")

It's time buckle up, and get ready for a long, bumpy ride.

For me, "Buckling up" is basically a particular specialized kind of grieving. I had hoped I lived in the world where this problem was easy and I could get away with a short burst of effort. Alas, I do not live in that world. I need to let that hope go, and re-orient. I use the word "grieving" to acknowledge a certain weight to it. I think there is shared structure between letting go a loved one who has died, and letting go of a belief that a particular problem is easy. 

It's often kind of psychologically loadbearing to think your problems will be easy. Alas, sometimes, you have to find a different way to be psychologically load-beared.

So I shift my mental (and sometimes physical) posture to one that is ready for a prolonged marathon. I get ready to take breaks and pace myself.

I take a deep breath.

And then I get to work, thinking.

Some examples of the starting points:

Debugging a mysterious problem in a codebase. I'm flailing around making console.logs, hoping the problem will reveal itself, without making a plan.Dealing with bureaucracy. Surely, it shouldn't be that many steps to get a doctor's appointment. Alas, not only is it more than one step to get the doctor's appointment, I maybe need to get another one after that.Navigating a social conflict. I keep trying to say the one phrase that'll convince them, or smooth everything over. Alas, the social conflict is deep and gnarly and isn't going away. Dealing with it requires modeling multiple steps out.Building a complex new product. Sometimes this on a longer scale: surely my initial weekend hackathon prototype is basically working and I can just build the obvious things and ship it and sell it. Alas, my customer's problems are more complex than I realized and I'm going to need to keep asking more questions and modeling new aspects of the situation and iterate significantly on my original idea.

What comes after the "buckle up" move depends on the situation, but often includes taking more breaks, thinking more strategically, and spending more time on "meta."

Triggers

When is it a good time to buckle up?

When you've tried the same thing multiple times, especially with a "flailing" sort of feel. 

When you feel surprised about something being effortful, multiple times in a row.

When you're bouncing around, and in particular, you don't feel like you're getting much value out of any of the things you're doing. (Sometimes structured-procrastination is a reasonable way for mull over a problem, but, in my experience, when I'm switching between a bunch of different versions of 'doomscrolling' or working on clearly low-value tasks, it's a particularly good time to "buckle up")

Exercises for the Reader

The skill here is "notice when it's time to make a difficult, prolonged effort", and then shift into "okay, I'm ready" with as little feet-dragging as you can. 

I don't actually have experience purposefully practicing this skill. My guess is that to seriously practice it would involve remembering a situation where you dragged your feet for awhile before accepting "this is actually hard", and then noticing all the little moments in between the first clue you could have noticed, and the final shift towards acceptance. (Essentially, the "Think It Faster" exercise for a situation that involved the "buckle up" move, which can take like 30-60 minutes)

Right now you're probably, like, reading this blogpost on your lunch break or in the evening when you're tired. If you want to get like 60 seconds of progress on becoming the sort of people who buckle up more smoothly/painlessly, I'd maybe try spending those 60 seconds:

Trying to remember some moment where you bounced around for awhile, before eventually switching to buckled up "okay I'm going to persist on this task" modeTry to remember as many details about how the transition went as you can...idk, let your brain mull it over a bit and see if anything bubbles up.

1. ^{^}

   This wasn't my original "step 2", but it kept coming up and seemed like it was worth making it's own post.

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