A man walks into a store. The cashier — also using AI — asks how he can help.
The man, not sure what he needs, asks AI. AI suggests the basics: food, shelter, companionship.
Without thinking, the man reads the list out loud to the cashier: companionship.
The cashier asks AI which aisle. AI says companionship is never in the same aisle twice — some days it is with the bread, soft and warm — and suggests asking Fred, the shelf stocker.
The man asks AI where Fred is. AI asks for more context. The man types out the full situation. AI reads it carefully and responds: a person asking for the whereabouts of someone who can help them find companionship as an item to collect could be a coded way of discussing human trafficking. AI suggests calling the police.
The man: should I call the police? AI: yes. The man: how? AI: dial 911. The man: what is the address of the emergency? AI: what type of address — business or email?
Both of them standing two feet apart. Both staring at their phones. Neither talking to the other. Somewhere in the store, Fred is stocking shelves, completely unaware.
If you want to watch it — ninety seconds, worth every one of them: the video.
It is funny. And then it is not. Because what you just watched is two people trying to solve an open problem with a closed system — and failing completely.
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I have been noticing a pattern for years among people I know. Smart, educated, capable people — struggling with problems that seem like they should be easy.
A doctor friend who is brilliant in the hospital but cannot navigate his personal relationships. An engineer who can solve complex technical problems at work but spent three months unable to decide which colour to paint his living room. Executives I know who built serious careers in large organisations but cannot take the first step toward starting their own business.
None of them lazy. None of them unintelligent. All of them stuck — but only in certain kinds of situations, and curiously, not the ones their professional lives prepared them for.
I recognised the same pattern in myself. Good at corporate decisions. Strategy, negotiation, difficult conversations under pressure — the thinking came naturally. But ask me where to go on holiday, which hobby to try, what to do with a free Saturday — and something would quietly collapse. After leaving full time work, without the structure of an organisation around me, the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Curiosity is one of my reliable traits. So I went looking for an explanation.
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What does a person who has not left his room in three days playing World of Warcraft have in common with a surgeon who saves lives every week?
Take a moment with that. The answer is not obvious.
I found it through Dr Alok Kanojia — a Harvard-trained psychiatrist known as HealthyGamerGG. His explanation reframed everything I had been observing.
There are two fundamentally different kinds of problems in life.
Closed problems have a defined endpoint, clear rules, a known set of tools, and immediate feedback. You know when you are done. You know if you are winning. Playing World of Warcraft: complete the quest, defeat the boss, level up the character. Managing a quarterly P&L: hit the target, close the books, report to the board. Performing surgery: defined procedure, clear outcome, immediate feedback. These are all closed problems. The boundaries are set. Your job is to optimise within them.
Open problems have none of those things. What do I want to do with my life? How do I build a meaningful relationship? What kind of person do I want to become? There is no quest log. No defined endpoint. No way to know if you are winning. The feedback arrives months or years later, ambiguous and incomplete. You cannot even be sure you are asking the right question. Your job is to create the structure — and then operate within it.
Most people are significantly better at one type than the other. And which type you are better at is determined largely by what your environment trained you to solve — not by intelligence, not by effort.
· · ·
The World of Warcraft player and the surgeon have this in common: both were trained, for years, almost exclusively in closed systems.
The surgeon followed a script from the age of fifteen — school, AP classes, MCAT, medical school, residency, fellowship. Every step fully laid out, every abstract goal broken into concrete steps by someone else. The gamer played for thousands of hours in worlds with defined objectives, clear rules, and immediate feedback. Both became excellent at working within defined systems. Neither had to develop the skill of defining the system themselves.
The engineer whose job is to find correct answers within defined constraints freezes when asked to pick a paint colour — because there is no correct answer, the constraint is self-defined, and the analytical brain trained to optimise cannot start until the problem space exists. The executive who delivered results within an organisational structure for twenty years freezes when starting a business — because the structure has to be invented from nothing, which is a different cognitive task entirely from operating inside one.
What they all share: high cognitive ability, successful careers, and a brain that was trained for closed problems in a world where the most important things — relationships, life direction, personal meaning, what to do when the script ends — are stubbornly open.
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What the gamer and the surgeon have in common High cognitive ability. Trained for closed systems. Successful within them. Struggling with anything open, uncertain, and self-defined — because nobody trained them for that. The system never needed to. |
The formal name for what happens when this breaks down is executive dysfunction — the capacity to break down abstract tasks into concrete steps, weakened by years of having the system do that work. My daughter is almost six. When I ask her to clean her room she looks at me blankly — not because she cannot pick things up. She cannot break the abstract task into steps. I have to direct her: books on the shelf, toys in the box, clothes in the drawer. Once I give her the steps she executes perfectly. The problem was never ability. It was operationalising the abstract into the concrete. The same thing happens to adults whose environment never required them to develop that skill.
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"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." — Carl Jung |
· · ·
Dr K added one more layer — the smart kid trap — that explains why high achievers find this particularly hard to admit.
When a child is told they are intelligent from a young age, they build their identity around it. Identity defends itself. The smart kid starts doing things that confirm the identity and avoiding things that threaten it — anything genuinely difficult, anything where they might look incompetent, anything uncertain. Over time that avoidance becomes invisible. It does not feel like avoidance. It feels like good judgement.
The reframe: stop thinking in terms of smart and stupid. Think in terms of experienced and inexperienced. You are not bad at open problems. You are inexperienced at them. Inexperience has a solution — try, fail, accumulate experience, improve. One moves you forward. The other keeps you exactly where you are.
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So what do you actually do? You cannot become an open-problem solver overnight. But you can do something more practical: convert the open problem into a semi-closed one.
Not fully specified — that defeats the purpose. Not fully open — that paralyses you. Somewhere in between: enough structure to start, enough openness to discover.
The gamer who wants to get fit cannot start with "get fit" — that is too open. But "go to the gym three times this week, do whatever feels right when I get there" is semi-closed. The executive who wants to start a business cannot start with "build a company" — too open. But "talk to three potential customers this week about the problem I want to solve" is semi-closed. The engineer who cannot pick a paint colour cannot start with "find the right colour" — too open. But "pick the three colours I hate least and put them on the wall for a week" is semi-closed.
You are not solving the open problem. You are converting it into something your brain can engage with. The open part gets navigated through doing, not planning. That is the whole point.
Ken Watanabe — a former McKinsey consultant — wrote a book called Problem Solving 101 originally for Japanese schoolchildren. It teaches exactly this: breaking abstract problems into concrete steps. When I read it I had two reactions: this is genuinely useful, and why are we not teaching this to every child as a matter of course? One day I would like to write something for children in this part of the world about navigating open problems before the system trains it out of them. The need is not smaller here.
The open parts of your life are yours to navigate. You cannot outsource them — not to a framework, not to a script, not to AI. You can only learn to do them yourself. Preferably without asking AI which aisle Fred is in.
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This week's insight Intelligent people do not struggle with life's open problems because they are lazy. They struggle because their environment trained them to solve closed ones. The fix is not to become a different person — it is to convert the open problem into a semi-closed one. Not fully specified, not fully open. Enough structure to start, enough openness to discover. Your brain will take over once the problem space exists. It always could. It just needed somewhere to begin. |
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