I would really like to see many examples of the obvious thing. It is not immediately obvious what the obvious thing you mean is, there are many times where the obvious thing is not even the most commonly vocalized solution to a problem. What comes to mind is say you want a job with a company, you could...
Email or message the head of the relevant department and ask them directly if they have a position for you: that seems like the obvious thing to me, to cold call.
The most common thing to do would be to find what the company’s recruiting mechanism is, by google search, and then to put in an application through that mechanism.
I have more faith in the common thing than the obvious thing. But again, this is why examples would help!
Aren’t both of these the obvious things? In that the obvious thing is what comes to mind that has a chance of working?
I would say “any direct solution to the problem”. Anything that fits the first line of the Mental Gymnastics meme. (...) I am explicitly asking not for much here, just a token amount of effort.
The main thing is to show proof of work. Any work that isn’t just busy work. You’re showing you’re serious about the problem, rather than just wanting to complain about it.
So if you e.g. complain that you’re fat and can’t seem to get your weight down, then the obvious things would be e.g. going to the gym a couple of times a week for a month or two, or actually properly dieting. If after this you still can’t get your weight down, then you’ve demonstrated that you’ve actually tried to solve your problem.
Another version of this point is this chart for tech support.
There are cases where someone might not be able to come up with any obvious approaches. These are rare. Most people just don’t actually think about problems they want to solve.
I would really like to see many examples of the obvious thing. It is not immediately obvious what the obvious thing you mean is, there are many times where the obvious thing is not even the most commonly vocalized solution to a problem. What comes to mind is say you want a job with a company, you could...
Email or message the head of the relevant department and ask them directly if they have a position for you: that seems like the obvious thing to me, to cold call.
The most common thing to do would be to find what the company’s recruiting mechanism is, by google search, and then to put in an application through that mechanism.
I have more faith in the common thing than the obvious thing. But again, this is why examples would help!
Aren’t both of these the obvious things? In that the obvious thing is what comes to mind that has a chance of working?
The main thing is to show proof of work. Any work that isn’t just busy work. You’re showing you’re serious about the problem, rather than just wanting to complain about it.
So if you e.g. complain that you’re fat and can’t seem to get your weight down, then the obvious things would be e.g. going to the gym a couple of times a week for a month or two, or actually properly dieting. If after this you still can’t get your weight down, then you’ve demonstrated that you’ve actually tried to solve your problem.
Another version of this point is this chart for tech support.
There are cases where someone might not be able to come up with any obvious approaches. These are rare. Most people just don’t actually think about problems they want to solve.