Recently I was having a conversation with one of my client's developers. We had found a bug and I was brought in to fix it. We had a long running background worker processing big data warehouse data and it was crashing nightly. Their solution was to re-queue it up and see if it would work. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I asked why not fix what was making it crash? Their response was basically “It could not be done”.

That did not quite sit right with me so after about 5 minutes of combing the logs, 10 minutes of googling the error message and another 15 of digging through the code I found a solution that would 100% prevent the error from ever happening again and it could be implemented in roughly 30 minutes(Probably less).

Why was I able to come up with a solution when the developer was so certain it was not possible? Was it because I was a better developer? No, the whole thing was actually coded in one of the languages I am weakest with. It was mainly because in my head I believed it was possible and in theirs they strongly believed it was not. They made a statement “It could not be done” which in my mind I posed a counter question “How could it be done?”. I wasn’t sure it was possible... well I was pretty sure it was. But because I asked the question “How?” I actually took actions to answer that question that ultimately resulted in a simple efficient solution.

I don’t mean to pick on just this developer. It is actually a very common self limiting habit many people have. Just last week at my New Year Eve party one of the guests was showing us a house they had found on Zillow but then quickly stated “I will never be able to afford a house like this”. Is that 100% true or is it more true that if you believe it is impossible you will never take the actions required to make it true.

I am by no means saying that you can just believe your way into something crazy like for example flying like Superman. No, instead just pointing out that oftentimes our own thoughts and imagination are what is holding us back from finding a solution. At times I am as guilty as anyone else. I have called it quits after a long day of bashing my head against a technical problem thinking it’s impossible only to find that the solution comes to me at 3 am the next morning.

Next time you find yourself or a colleague saying that a problem “can’t be solved” or something is impossible you might just want to reframe that statement into a question and ask “How could it be solved?”. It never hurts to ask.

~Cheers