To go from point A to B, there are a lot of paths you can take, both mathematically and in real life. This article is about my observations and reflections on how to move from point A to B in real life, on how to think about the problem and how to achieve the goal.

It’s common to think that in order to achieve what we want, things have to happen in steps. Usually starting with easier, low-level ones and we build up from there. I do believe it’s an excellent way of doing things, it’s stable, reasonable, and every step you take is easy to validate. Such as moving up grades in school and eventually getting into college.

The only problem is that we don’t have that much time and we also astonishingly suck at identifying the necessary steps that has to be taken in order to achieve something. Especially if you set out to build something and there’s a very clear goal that you are trying to achieve.

A great quality among human beings is the ability to handle uncertainty well. In its very essence is the ability to question what one has been taught and the bravery and capability to draw meaningful conclusions from a small set of unstructured and noisy data that has been collected. Seemingly logical statements like “because this plan has this and that problem, something will certainly happen and we should do this to resolve the issues” are frequently false. It concerns the future and lacks real data. So apply this back to A to B problem. “If you want to do that, you should first learn to do this” is not a very valid statement. But this kind of intellectual misconception is extremely common among many Phd people I have talked to.

My opinion is that after identifying a problem that we want to solve, instead of burying ourselves in the textbooks of relevant subjects, ask the most literal and seemingly stupid yet extremely raw questions. We have a fear for simple answers, because we don’t want to admit how much we overestimate our intelligence. A very useful question is “do I really need to do A to achieve the goal” or “if path A is strictly banned by the mysterious force in the universe, what else can I do to achieve it?” You might end up finding a path that is more efficient.