Heh... I spent all of grad school asking this same question. IMHO, a lot of it comes from actively seeking out diverse experiences that require problem solving. Your problem, for example, might be to bring your colleagues out to go rock climbing (gigantic, vertical problem set requiring kinesthetic knowledge) and to a Habit for Humanity site (spatial as well as, sequential problem solving, with a healthy dose of cat herding and a smattering of various maths). It's not intuitive to everyone, but I think you get better at applying past experiences to a problem by accumulating experiences in domains that seem to have nothing to do with your customary problems: it makes your brain more flexible in applying those seemingly unrelated lessons to the problem at hand. When you think about it, your biggest asset in problem solving is flexibility, not necessarily domain-specific knowledge.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-01-06 11:31 pm (UTC)IMHO, a lot of it comes from actively seeking out diverse experiences that require problem solving. Your problem, for example, might be to bring your colleagues out to go rock climbing (gigantic, vertical problem set requiring kinesthetic knowledge) and to a Habit for Humanity site (spatial as well as, sequential problem solving, with a healthy dose of cat herding and a smattering of various maths).
It's not intuitive to everyone, but I think you get better at applying past experiences to a problem by accumulating experiences in domains that seem to have nothing to do with your customary problems: it makes your brain more flexible in applying those seemingly unrelated lessons to the problem at hand. When you think about it, your biggest asset in problem solving is flexibility, not necessarily domain-specific knowledge.