Letter to Ansh — 17: Solving a Problem

Dear Ansh

It is Saturday afternoon, 11th April 2020. You and your mum were supposed to come back from visiting your grandparents almost ten days back. But international travel is almost frozen.

For now I am a bit resigned to the fact that you will be stuck in India for potentially months more. What is important now is that you and your mother stay safe wherever you are.

In a bit of a good news, Australia seems to have got the virus under control. On a bit of a distressing note, India seems to be in a precarious situation. The first thing I do in the morning is check the numbers in Ahmedabad and Raigad.

The next few weeks are going to be crucial.

In times such as these it is often easy to fall prey to desperation and feel sorry for yourself.

Avoid that temptation.

Self-pity gets you nowhere.

You may find it as a way to rationalize failures, but the reality is no one cares and nor should they.

The cards dealt to you only matter so much, what matters is how you play your hand. You may not be able to influence the winds, but you can tack your sail to navigate them to your advantage.

While the things that happen around you are often out of your control, the way you respond to is absolutely under yours.

And while every problem you face cannot be solved and some definetely require acceptance, most challenges you face can be solved.

There are a few tools you can employ.

The first among them is relying on first principles.

When faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, ask yourself if the assumptions are really true?

Often times a problem appears bigger than it really is because we rely on second hand wisdom. People fail against a particular challenge and then it becomes accepted wisdom that the particular problem cannot be solved.

But often times things change over a period of time, new tools emerge that make a previously insurmountable problem suddenly solvable.

Yet it remains untouched, because mental inertia of the masses dictates that the problem remains unsolvable.

When faced with a challenge, always ask yourself, “why a certain thing is the way it is”.

Try to understand the problem, figure out the mechanics, the internal workings. See whether each of the assumptions that have been laid down are really true or whether they need to be revised.

Check what is the overall objective, and if that same objective can be achieved via different simpler means.

If that can be done then, and based upon data and logic you can take the new route with manageable repercussions, then do so. Do not be hung up on the old way, question it and determine for yourself if there are better ways to do the same and achieve same or better results.

The next tool is breaking down a big problem into smaller ones.

I will give you an example to illustrate this.

At the turn of the last century various groups were trying to demonstrate and develop heavier than air powered flight. It was a hard challenge. Afterall men are not designed to fly. We are meant to walk tethered to the ground.

While there were many groups all over the world trying to attempt it, the two key ones I want to focus on is a massively funded government backed group and another one working in a bike shed on their own.

The government funded one had access to the top minds of academia, engineers, tools, and pretty much an unlimited spigot of money.

The other group was a couple of brothers who ran a bike garage. With no formal training of sorts.

And yet the boys with the bike took to air first solving a problem that had vexed humanity for centuries.

They did so because they managed to use the two tools I described earlier.

The conventional wisdom was that powered heavier than air controlled flight might never be possible.

The Wright brothers decided to take an axe to that by first questioning that assumption.

They broke down the problem of powered flights into its constituents.

1. Lift
2. Power and
3. Control

Once they had done that the challenge suddenly seemed not so big anymore.

The problem of lift for heavier than air bodies had already been resolved to some extent. Simple gliders existed and the concept of curved wing to generate lift was already an established one.

The government one with its access to massive funding tried to create one true size experimental plane after another with different curvatures.

And they failed again and again.

Each experiment too long and each failure was expensive which would set them back further and further.

The bike guys on the other hand did not have access to these resources, so they decided to improvise.

They built small scale models of the wings and they placed them in a glass tube and passed smoke over it to observe how they react.

What they effectively had done was to create one of the first wind tunnels!

This saved them costs both in terms of money and effort and allowed them to conduct far more experiments to arrive at an optimized design.

This is a very important lesson, when doing something new try to figure out how you can come up with solutions via doing small experiments that you can repeat many times over.

The Wright brothers solved the first subproblem of lift using small, cost effective experiments and questioning assumptions on how an experiment should be done.

The second big problem was power.

Unpowered gliders existed, but they were at the mercy of the wind. What was needed is a mechanism to create your own wind and generate lift using it.

Underwater Propellers existed for ships, similar fans could work in theory for pushing airships.

The problem was not how to move the wind, but rather how to have an engine that is light enough and can generate enough power to move the fan fast enough.

Till the Wright brothers came along engines used to be primarily coal and steam heavy bulky affairs. One of these would never be light enough to put on an airplane to fly.

So people thought powered heavier than air flight would never be possible.

And that was largely true for a very long period of time.

But around the same time petrol based internal combustion engines burst on the scene. Suddenly engines were light and powerful. Petrol was a far more energy dense than coal which meant lesser weight of it would generate far more energy.

Yet they were still not light enough to be put on an airplane and generate enough power to fly.

There was a gap that was still to be overcome.

The Wright brothers saw that gap and put their thinking hat on.

Engines were getting there but they were still heavier than they would like.

How could they fix this?

They started by applying first principles.

The first question was why were the engines so heavy? And the answer was because they were made of Iron and steel.

Could they be made of something else to make it lighter?

And the answer was Yes!

Aluminum was a much lighter metal.

The wright brothers built their own internal combustion engine made up of Aluminum.

Suddenly they had an engine which had the right power to weight ratio to generate enough lift needed for an heavier than air aircraft.

They had solved two out of the three main problems.

The final challenge was control.

It was fine to get in the air when needed, but how do you ensure you can go where you want to go?

The defense team thought of airplane control similar to cars, which are naturally steady and you only employ control when you want to make them go in a different direction.

However airplanes are not like cars.

Cars have solid ground underneath them, they have four wheels and are not fighting imbalance all the time to continue doing what they need to do.

The closest analogy was a bicycle!

Bicycles need to be balanced continuously by their riders as if you dont they will fall over.

Bike control surfaces are operated by cables.

The Wright brothers knew everything about bikes.

Unlike cars which have heavy transmissions, bike cables are much more lighter.

The defense team tried to build a perfect flying car, while the Wright brothers built control surfaces by running bike cables all around their aircraft.

The Wright brothers knew what they were doing would work. On the night before their test, one of them wrote in their diary, “Success is certain”.

They understood that even hard problems can be beaten if you work systematically and break them down into their smaller constituents.

However not all problems can be broken down into clean sub problems.

Often you have problems that have subsystems that are so closely linked with each other that breaking them down and solving them separately becomes impossible.

In those cases it becomes a much more drawn out process but it is still solvable.

What you do is hold all other variables steady and try to solve for one side first.

An example is a two sided marketplace. You need enough people to attract enough merchants and you need enough merchants to attract attract enough people to come to the market.

How do you achieve both at the same time?

The answer is you start with the side which you can control first.

You keep it steady, create your own supply and try to attract the other side.

Once you have enough volume on the one side you can then go about solving the other side.

This is easier said than done, but not impossible.

Most things in life, my son are not impossible. Apply your mind, employ reason. You will find a way.

I will be there with you every step of it.

Your loving father

Moresh