Always Have a Solution on the Board

Sports are filled with intriguing stories of underdogs beating the odds. Superior talent can often be deceptive when it is opposed by willpower and a relentless work ethic. In 1980, a bunch of freshfaced college kids on the United States Olympic hockey team improbably defeated a Soviet Union team that had won five of the previous six gold medals. In 1969, a supposedly inferior AFL team called the New York Jets won the Super Bowl over the NFL’s Baltimore Colts in a game that forever changed the perception of the two leagues’ talent gap. More recently, in Super Bowl XLII, the New York Giants were two-touchdown underdogs to the previously unbeaten New England Patriots and wound up winning on a last-minute touchdown drive that won’t soon be for gotten. Back in 1990, Buster Douglas beat 42-to-1 odds by defeating a peaking Mike Tyson in a boxing match that wasn’t supposed to get past the second round. In 2007, Appalachian State stunned a highly ranked Michigan football team playing at home in a game that was supposed to be a de facto early-season “warm-up” for the storied Wolverines. And the list goes on (with your geographical location likely to dictate which notable upsets you remember most). In all of these instances, a team or athlete shocked the sporting world by pulling off what was seemingly impossible. The chances of these underdogs winning were rated by outsiders as next to zero: showing up and competing was essentially a formality. What these winning teams and players consciously or unconsciously understood was that success isn’t built on worrying about all the problems a supposedly superior opponent presents. Excellence is achieved through a solution-focused mind. Simply put, teams like the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and the 2007 New York Giants keep their eyes on what they need to do rather than worrying about how they stack up next to a more “accomplished” opponent. They allow nothing to waylay them, regardless of any statistical evidence that they have precious little chance of winning. We humans are better at seeing problems than we are at seeing solutions. This itself is a problem, because what we dwell on expands. When we spend most of our lives thinking about problems, we heft an unnecessary weight onto our shoulders. Fortunately, we have the capacity for change. We are able to overcome our human tendency to continuously ruminate on problems and actually become solution focused. The following fictitious story helps illustrate the difference between a problem-focused mind-set and a solution-focused mind-set. A yacht, sailing far offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, was taking on water and sinking, forcing the passengers onto the vessel’s two safety boats. For the harried people aboard the safety boats, the outlook was bleak. They could not spy land in any direction, and no one on either boat knew which way to begin paddling. They were undersupplied, cold, and wet, having only the clothes they wore and a few oars. As the boats began to drift apart, the passengers of each boat shared their thoughts as to the best course of action. One of the safety boats held solution-focused passengers. They decided, based on the location of the sun and their best guess of their starting point, to face the boat due west and begin paddling in shifts so that they could all take turns working and resting. The second boat, which carried problem-focused passengers, came to a different conclusion. Each time someone suggested a possible solution, someone else argued against the plan, finding reasons for its assured failure. The problem-focused crew members became convinced that rowing to land was impossible, as they were at least three hundred miles from the nearest shoreline; they had no food or water; the safety boats were not built to withstand the ripping winds and stormy seas of the Atlantic; and they were all soaked to the bone, shivering, and exhausted. Eventually, they deemed their situation hopeless. They attempted to convey their fears and despair to the companion safety boat, but to no avail, as it was already too far away for its passengers to hear their wails.