Invisible solutions

When I was a kid, I thought it was a coincidence that all the child actors lived in New York or L.A. (Image by Felix Dilly)

Even though most of us have computers in our pockets, it's still entirely possible to get stuck.

A million things have changed since I was twelve (for instance, there's now the Internet), but today's twelve-year-olds are often just as helpless as I was to find a solution to a problem or an answer to a question.

In order to solve a problem or find an answer, you have to know what to search for. You have to know what questions to ask.

What's more, you have to believe that an answer exists to begin with. That requires a leap that not all of us are used to making.

After all, we live in a world where it's possible to only see what we want to see.

We can train news aggregators and social media feeds to show us only the stories and topics we're interested in.

We can visit only the websites we want and keep our televisions on a select group of channels. In fact, we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want to. We don't even need to sit through commercials.

And we can associate with people who think like we do and ignore most of the others.

This certainly has implications for culture and politics and the long-term health of our society. On an individual level, it leads us to believe that if we don't know about something, it doesn't exist.

And if we don't know how to do something, we might assume that it can't be done.

This attitude pervades not only school classrooms but professional spaces as well. If we aren't sure how to move forward, we might scrap a project or make do with a weak version of it without realizing that there are resources — books, articles, experts — that can help us take the next step.

Because we don't see it, we don't know how much support others are receiving. We aren't aware of the extent to which we could benefit from similar guidance.

These days, the most celebrated young contemporary singer/songwriters typically collaborate on their early albums with a professional adult co-writer who has already written hit songs. No matter how much songwriting experience you have, do you think you could co-write a hit song with Max Martin, the guy who has songwriting credits on Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time" and Taylor Swift's "Shake it Off"? I think you could.

And after having that experience, would it make you better able to write a hit song on your own? I think it would. Now you just have to get cute and learn the choreography.

Those we revere as talented (including Max Martin) often have a pedigree. They have mentors. They have access to information, systems, and personnel that we might struggle to imagine.

To the extent that we can imagine it, we can mimic their approach to get closer to achieving those results ourselves — or at least, we can understand why we're not getting the same results.

If you're having trouble getting a project off the ground or taking the next step with it, you might consider whether there are solutions you haven't conceived of that could be available at the click of a button, through a visit to the library, or via a phone call.

As resourceful as you are, the hard part is seeing the resources that have always been invisible to you. These are the ones that could make a difference if you could identify them.

If someone else is succeeding in a way that you can only dream of, they certainly might have worked harder than you or have more talent. But in helping others, I've so often observed that there are practical solutions that are accessible to all of us if we know to look for them. It starts with being open to the idea of doing things in a different way; more often than not, that way will begin to open up. And once you train yourself to see it, you'll see more and more.