Susie had been working on a puzzle that we had gotten for Christmas & I spent an evening helping. Within minutes I had an insight about achievement. Susie said making the puzzle had triggered all kinds of insights. Here are just a few of the lessons she gained by working the puzzle.1) Start with frame. It’s almost impossible to put a complex puzzle together without doing the edges first. Life, the great puzzle, is more easily worked out when you first build a framework for putting it together.
2) Work areas that are obvious first. You focus on specific tasks. The red wagon. The blue door. Don’t worry about other parts of the puzzle. They will become easier to do later when the pieces around it are assembled.
3) Sometimes it seems like critical pieces are missing. But in truth they are all there, though we don’t always recognize them when we first see them.
4) Sometimes others help us. Their fresh perspective helps us see things we hadn’t seen before and thus moves us forward.
5) Sometimes it seems there are too many pieces. They can’t all fit in this picture, can they?
6) Christina (our daughter) came along and put in a piece. Even a child can see solutions at times that we miss.
7) Puzzles are put together one piece at a time. Achievement is a series of small successes.
8) Persistence is necessary in order to succeed.
9) It’s not arbitrary. You are following a pattern. Life works better when we have role models and people to pattern our lives after.
10) When a piece doesn’t fit, you can’t keep jamming it in trying to force it. Kids learn this at an early age, but many adults seem never to have learned this lesson.
January 22, 1994
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