Problem solving is the best soft skill to attract really talented people who can help boost your career and achieve your dream.
Having this soft skill under your belt will have you surrounded by high potential individuals, which will eventually and inevitably open doors to new and better opportunities.
There are 3 reasons why being good at this soft skill will make you popular among high-potential individuals.
1. Really talented people have important problems that need solving
There are hundreds of ways to find talented people.
But this one question is usually enough to discern their potential, and it is:
“what is your dream?”
True, we are not in elementary school anymore, and the more we age the heavier reality weighs on us almost making it sound naive to even have a dream.
People who are, or have the potential to become really talented, however, have a clear answer to this question.
The answer can be anywhere between opening a small cafe in town to improving the lives of 1 million people in a poverty stricken part of the world.
The size of the dream does not matter as long as there is one.
They can be already renowned executives in large companies, the CEO of a hugely successful Startup, a budding entrepreneur, a college drop-out, and even a high school student.
Those with dreams have great ambition and drive. The dream acts as the fuel to propel them forward to tackle both big and small problems.
They go against the grain and are always eager to achieve their dream by starting their own initiatives, projects or companies.
This makes them an easy target to help because they are always facing new challenges.
That’s where you come in.
2. A friend in need is a friend indeed
Helping somebody really talented who is struggling with a problem is the number one way to build a powerful network.
It becomes much easier to do if you have highly developed problem solving soft skill.
That’s exactly what Sam Altman, the former CEO of Y-Combinator, did to land some extremely lucrative investments with returns in the hundreds of millions.
You can read his story and his take on what it takes to be successful here.
Even though Sam was a busy guy, he always set time and effort to help his dreamer friends struggling with their fledgling projects.
He didn’t expect anything from them and did what he did out of goodwill.
The nudge he gave might have been something small as listening to their pains all the way to helping them set up a business model, sales strategy or identifying target customers.
Fast forward a few years and some of those people scaled their projects to billion dollar ventures and others gave Sam a heads up on lucrative investment deals.
As Sam’s example demonstrates, there is a direct correlation between personal success and the number of really talented people around you.
If you want extraordinary success, it is imperative to have extraordinary people around you.
3. The word will spread like wildfire
When you help a talented person with his problem, the word will spread.
You should never underestimate the power of network effect.
Talented people usually have an eye for other talented people.
They also feel most comfortable being around people with big dreams.
This means there are dozens, if not hundreds of other gems in the shadows of one talented person.
If you consistently seek out to help people with their problem, you will build a reputation of being a generous giver. Everybody likes a benevolent giver.
Once you pile up that reputation, you just need to lay back and wait to get invited to interesting luncheons, dinners and parties where you will now have access to the brightest people.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Now that you know the value of problem solving soft skill, it’s time to find out how you can build this skill in the shortest time possible.
Best way to be good at problem solving soft skill is by mastering guesstimation
Problems can come in many shapes and forms:
- “I am trying to make a keyboard application and would like to focus on making beautiful emojis. How many times do you think the 🙂 emoji is used globally per year?”
- “Hey, I came up with a formula for great dog food. I’m curious, what is the total dog food market size in the US?”
- “I wonder if I should just quit my job and start my own small restaurant. Would I be happy?”
Though all these problems seem to have nothing in common, the secret to cracking them is to know they all share a similar structure.
Nomatter how big and scary the problem, it can be broken down to bite-size pieces that are easier to solve.
You solve those small chunks, add them back together, present your conclusion and voila!
You just gave a logical and well-structured solution. Well done!
A great way to become good at this is to be comfortable with guesstimating, also known as back-of-the-envelope calculations or fermi problems.
It covers the core of problem solving soft skill and is relatively simple to do with practice.
How often is the 🙂 emoji used in chats in the world?
Let’s take one of the examples above.
Imagine a talented app developer friend came up to you and said:
“Hey, can you help me figure out how many times the 🙂 emoji is used in a year globally?”
This is how I would guesstimate the answer:
- Well, if we knew the total number of hours people spend on communication devices times the number of times the 🙂 emoji is used per hour, we could get an estimate of the global number of 🙂 used in a year.
- Lets begin by finding the total number of hours people spend on communication devices. This is going to be a long and fun ride…!
- We know there are approximately 7 billion people on earth. I’d say the world population can be divided into three tiers depending on wealth: the well-off, the I’m-doing-ok, and the poor.
- I would consider well off countries with a GDP per capita of at least $20,000. The I’m-doing-ok countries would be those with a GDP per capita between $1,000 – $19,000, and poor countries to have a GDP per capita of less than $1,000.
- People have personal communication devices and work-related communication devices. Since the 🙂 emoji would be more appropriate for personal communication settings, I’ll just consider the number of personal communication devices in the world.
- I would say 100% of people from wealthy nations have at least one personal communication device (eg. phone and PC). That would be 80% for I’m-doing-ok nations and 20% for poor countries (eg. phone).
- I’m guessing roughly 30% of the world population is well off, 60% are doing-ok and the remaining 10% are poor.
- Let’s do the math. 30% of 7 billion is 2.1 billion. So 2.1 billion devices. Next is I’m-doing-ok countries. 60% of 7 billion is 4.2 billion people times 80% is approximately 3.2 billion devices. Lastly, 10% of 7 billion is 700 million and 20% of it is approximately 0.1 billion. Add all the number of devices and we have 5.4 billion.
- We didn’t take into consideration the really old and really young who aren’t capable of using these devices. Let’s say on average those two groups compose 20% of every nation’s population. So we need to remove 20% from 5.4 billion which would give us somewhere around 4.4 billion.
- Since 🙂 emoji is in non-professional settings (a.k.a after working hours), I would need to find the total hour people usually spend on their personal communication during their free time.
- For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume that the normal working hours of 9 to 5 applies across all nations. I will also assume that people take approximately 1.5 hours for dinner, and 0.5 hours for cleaning up, and sleep at 12. That makes an average person’s free time during the weekday be around 5 hours.
- Let’s say that people have double the free time during weekends. So 10 hours for Saturday and another 10 hours for Sunday making it 20 hours.
- Therefore, one week is comprised of 5 times 5 or 25 free hours during the weekday and 20 hours on the weekend making it a total 45 hours of free time per week.
- We know there are around 50 weeks a year, so 45 hours times 50 weeks makes 2,250 hours. Wow, that’s a lot of free time…
- People usually use their devices not only for communicating but for consuming content. Let’s say content conumption makes 80% of a normal person’s time, leaving just 20% for communication, whether it is through chat or other social media platform.
- 20% of 2,250 hours is 450 hours.
- 450 hours a year times 5.4 billion people is approximately 2.5 trillion hours.
- Now we need to figure out how many times the 🙂 emoji would get used per hour. This would obviously differ by country but lets make it simple and categorize people’s emotion into the most common categories: happy and sad.
- I would say that people are more happy, or atleast pretend to be happy, rather than admit they are sad. So 80% of all emojis would be happy-related. The most common type of happy emojis are 🙂 😀 😛 . The 🙂 is the most common so let’s say it get’s used 50% of the time when somebody is trying to express they are happy.
- I’m guessing the average person doesn’t text hardcore but rather send around 10 words per minute. Assuming they can keep that pace for one hour, that would be 10 words per minute times 60 minutes, or 600 words.
- Let’s say that 2% of the words are emoji-based. So, 600 words times 2% is 12 emojis. From those 12 emojis 80% would be happy related, or around 10, and from those 10 happy emojis 50% would be :), making the total number of 🙂 used per hour to be 5.
- So 5 🙂 emojis times 2.5 trillion hours of communication makes 12.5 trillion 🙂 emojis!
Did I get the answer correct?
What I do know is that I got the global number of personal communication devices pretty close to the actual statistics!
But only God knows whether I guessed the final answer anywhere close to the actual number of 🙂 emoji used in a year…
Maybe some of my assumptions were completely ridiculous. But maybe some of those crazy assumptions cancelled themselves out and led me to a sensible answer.
The whole point of doing this excercise, however, is not to get an accurate answer. There is a reason it is called ‘guesstimation’.
The purpose behind guesstimation is to have your brain accustomed to 2 situations:
- Being comfortable with big hairy problems
- Structured thinking
When I do a guesstimation exercise infront of them in real time I usually get two different types of reaction:
- Hey, I could do that!
- Dude… that is way out of my league. What you’re doing is like magic…
If it makes you feel any better, I was number 2 for a long time.
The first time I met someone who was incredibly good at guesstimation, I felt my jaw dropping to the floor.
How could a person’s head spin so quickly? How can I possibly better at this soft skill?
Fast forward a couple months of consistent pracice and I found myself capable of doing the exact same thing, if not better.
There is nothing more to being good at this soft skill other than than practice and grit.
It helps to be quick with numbers but those two, practice and grit, are the ONLY things that you need to be good at guesstimation.
Practice is key.
How about one more example to get the ball rolling?
Let’s take one more of the examples above.
Imagine a talented chemist friend of yours came up to you and said:
“Hey, I came up with a formula for great dog food. I’m curious, what would be the total addressable market?”
Give yourself some time and try answering this yourself!
This is how I would guesstimate the answer:
- Well, if we found the total kg (weight) of food that all dogs in the US eat in a year and divide that by the average price per kg of dog food, we would get an approximate market size.
- I know there are around 320 million people living in the US.
- I also know the average household size is 3 people.
- You divide the 320 million people by the average household size of 3 and you get around 100 million households.
- From those 100 million household, I would guess roughly one out of two Americans would have some sort of pet because the US is a pet-friendly country, which leaves us with 50 million households with pets.
- I think house pets can be dividied into 3 categories: dogs, cats and others. I would say people tend to like dogs more than cats or other animals so I’ll assume 50% prefer dogs, which cuts the total number of household with dogs down to 25 million.
- I’ll assume that each household has on average 1 dog, so 25 million dogs.
- Now, I know big dogs eat more than small dogs but lets say that an average dog eats 100g of dog food per meal.
- So if a dog has 3 meals a day that would be 300g per day. Times that by 365 days and you would get something around 100,000g or 100kg.
- 100kg times 25 million dogs is 2.5 billion kg. Wow!
- I know a 7kg dog food costs somewhere around $50, which means that the price per kg is around $7
- Now 2.5 billion times $7 is approximately $17 billion
So, I checked the internet and turns out that I wasn’t too far from the answer! The actual size was around $20 billion. I was shy around $3 billion 😂
Calculation: the total pet food market in the US was estimated at $38.4 billion in 2020, and dog food segment represented approximately 57% of the entire pet food market, which makes dog food market around $20 billion.
Is that it?
You might be thinki:
“Well, guesstimation might be good when we need to solve a number related problem, but not all problems are number related!”
Going back to my friend’s example, knowing the market size for dog food is $20 billion does not tell him much other than the obvious fact that the market is huge.
The information is not enough for him to decide whether or not to fully dedicate himself to develop, produce and sell his new dog food.
How would we proceed from here?
Great news is that we can adopt the same problem solving soft skill.
We would need to break down the bigger question into smaller parts.
Hence, we would need to understand the customer, product and sales channel.
Product
If we want to know whether it is worth my friend’s time to make his special dog food, we need to figure out if there would be demand for it.
Logically, we would need to understand what kind of dog food he is making and how it compares to other products in the market.
Then, once we find out how attactive our friend’s product is versus competition, we need to find out whether there would be demand for it.
Customer
To better understand customers, we would need to segment them into relevant categories.
Once we have a clear understanding of the different segments and what their dog food preference, we can match which customer segment would be open to trying our friend’s new product.
Sales channel
There are many ways we could sell the dog food.
For example, one way could be to sell it directly to end-customers online, and another would be to sell it offline.
Offline could be segmented to wholeselling to a distributor, through your own shop or through a department store, just to name a few.
The actual break-down and structuring of these various components needs consistent practice.
Wrapping it up
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Guesstimation is a powerful exercise and one of the best ways to be develop your problem solving soft skill.
It is a tool that will help you cope with complexity in an organized and structured way.
Moreover, it is a valuable skill to have and in short supply so learning it could help you gain an edge over your peers and stay ahead.
For those who would like to practice, I leave here a few guesstimation problems:
- how many pingpong balls would fit in an airplane?
- how tall do you think is the tallest building in your town?
- what would be the perfect amount of time for a red light?
- how much would yourl local train weigh?
- what do you think is the market size for smart phone cases?
If you would like to learn more and want to be excellent at this skill, read more here (link)
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I hope you enjoyed this piece on the best soft skill to super-charge your career!
As always, feel free to comment, ask questions or provide any kind of feedback 🙂
Wish you have a wonderful day!