Problems are not roadblocks, but exercise tools.
First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.
It is cycling as a professional sport that represents the problem. It can transform someone into a liar.
I love kids, so working with them wasn't a problem.
People aren't so interested in seeing movies about women's problems.
I just talk a lot, that's the problem.
Everybody has problems. Everyone has issues.
One of the problems with the Internet is that a lot of times it is inaccurate.
Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.
I don't have a problem with being a woman. Women's bodies are so beautiful.
One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You ...
Great artistic works are often based on solving several psychological problems simultaneously. In literature this is often accomplished by splitting apart the conflict and assigning each aspect to a different character. Marjie Rynearson, for instance...
Frank Costello: I'm going to have my associate search you. Billy Costigan: No, no one's fucking searching me. Searching me for what? Frank Costello: Contra-fucking-band. Take your shoes off. [French slams Costigan into a chair] Mr. French: Shoes. Fra...
One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manner...
There's an old joke among software developers. When something works in an unexpected but strangely effective way, the developers often kid, "Oh, that's not a bug. That's a future." While this is usually a joke, designers can use the same technique of...
If you bake a cupcake, the world has one more cupcake. If you become a circus clown, the world has one more squirt of seltzer down someone's pants. But if you win an Olympic gold medal, the world will not have one more Olympic gold medalist. It will ...
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow. Awareness of others is a healthy antido...
When I was a child, all problems had ended with a single word from my father. A smile from him was sunshine, his scowl a bolt of thunder. He was smart, and generous, and honorable without fail. He could exile a trespasser, check my math homework, and...
The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the origina...
I had a dream about you. We were almost omniscient, seeing all the problems in this world. We noticed the scratch on my bumper, the ding in my passenger-side door, and the bloodstains in the trunk of my car. But we didn’t notice the biggest problem...
Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a n...
