The human mind is fascinating, for many reasons. Here’s just one example.

Until a few weeks ago, I thought that my purpose in life was eliminating problems. It went hand-in-hand with the idea of kaizen (as mentioned earlier on this blog). It’s not something I consciously thought about; it simply developed over the years, because that’s what I was doing every day, both in my current professional life as a software developer and in my previous one as an electronics technician.

That’s fine as far as it goes. There is a long and distinguished history of people who have spent their lives eliminating problems, and I felt honored to be part of that tradition. It gave my life meaning. While I was working on Project Badger, even if the problems I was solving only helped a few thousand people, they were problems that those people didn’t have the time, knowledge, and experience to solve on their own. I was contributing in a way that no one else could, and that felt good.

But there were two subtle and unrecognized flaws in that purpose. The first was simple enough, and obvious in retrospect: a lot of problems can’t be eliminated. They can only be dealt with individually, each time they come up. That’s a perpetual irritation to someone who practices the kaizen model of thinking.

The second was that I’m a completionist. I don’t consider something done until it’s all done. That’s a good thing in general, but when I’d subconsciously compare the number of problems that I’ve eliminated in my life with the total number of problems out there and see no appreciable progress, I’d feel depressed.

These two flaws might seem insignificant, and they really were once I realized them. But subconscious attitudes that have built up over a lifetime aren’t that easy to drag out where they can be dealt with — it took someone else pointing them out before I could see them at all.

Not coincidentally, that article also provided the seeds of a solution to them both. It was a simple mental adjustment: instead of eliminating (all) problems, my purpose was to deal with problems. I’m still free to practice kaizen and eliminate any problem where that’s possible, but if a problem can’t be eliminated, I’m allowed to deal with it without getting irritated that it can’t. And I now that I consciously see that I’m not supposed to solve all of the world’s problems, I don’t look for progress in that direction, and its lack doesn’t depress me.

Such a minor alteration, to such a small and simple thought — but it changes everything.

That’s why I say that the human mind is fascinating. That’s also why I consider having one to be so frustrating. But I guess it’s better than the alternative. 😉