202308271047 Be a realistic critical thinker

We should almost never take things for certain when we learn them. We should be asking why things are the way they are, and if they could be differently. We should view someone saying "that can't be done" as a challenge.

At the same time, by trying to understand the underlying nature of the problems we solve we should develop a realistic intuition for the times that things are difficult or complex because they are actually hard. There are hard problems to solve that have complexity that we can't simplify by simply reworking the problem. These are the places that we'll have to accept and embrace the challenge. Understanding that difficult things are difficult and will take a long time or lot of effort to solve gives us the stamina to keep at it.¹