What Dr.House thought me about solving problems and 80:20 productivity rule
Hi all, I’m back again with a non-technical post, just wanted to put out something on how I generally approach problem solving to graphics and life in general, the show “House MD” really helped me gain deeper insights into solving stuff in life. I would also like to thank my ex-colleagues and my mentor while I was at Sony for developing such habits.
just a warning these won’t help while you try to solve your relationship troubles lol 😂😂, dumb me have tried so sorry folks 🥺 lol.
Dr.House’s way of solving problems
So recently, I’ve been binge watching House M.D. for the 5th time (sorry I’m addicted to Hugh Laurie) I suppose and I wanted to reflect back on what the show has taught me. It taught me 2 important things that I apply to my work and life all the time to solve problems.
- “If something doesn’t make sense, then one of your assumptions is wrong” - as quoted by Dr.House
- Missing data is most probably the root cause of your problems - knowledge, info, theory etc.
So when I’m really stuck with a problem, say we have some artifacts on hair, I ask myself, What assumptions did I make regarding and try to validate them one-by-one to see if things start making better sense. And then I proceed to find any missing knowledge, let it be some theory about Hair rendering, something about some arithmetic, any data about the rendering setup (code and frame captures) that I’m previously unaware of I try to gain it, and then analyze what is missing and reason using it. These 2 approaches usually help narrow down the solution.
80:20 productivity rule
This might sounds preposterous and fake and might not even make sense, but it helps me a lot while I try to tackle issues and try to get myself out a gloomy-deadlock kind of environment.
What I believe is that 20% of the core issues or wrong assumptions regarding something ariese due to the fact that you’re missing 80% of data.
The data can be in form of knowledge, some concept or a theory, or missing data about the systme you’re debugging etc. So getting more data and knowledge should give you enough tools to solve the problem at hand more robustly. This kind of supports the above 2 ways to solve problems so might not be entire false as well.
closing notes
So yeah correcting assumptions and finding any missing data is the key to solve most porblems for me. Let’s see how I’ll progress in life with these tools at hand. Also with year coming to end, I’m excited for new chapter in life and new habits and also getting nostalgic with basics again.