Universal Problem Solver
When a problem feels immovable, five focused minutes can reveal more ways forward than seems reasonable. I learned this exercise at a Center for Applied Rationality workshop and have used it ever since. Three movements: name it, pour, harvest. Bring one stubborn problem; leave with one next action.
Before you play
Everything below happens in your browser and stays there. Your problem never leaves this page. A draft of your list stays on this device until you choose Start afresh, so a closed tab can pick up where the pen stopped.
Possible ways in — sensible, silly, expensive, rude, half-magic. Write them all. No judging while pouring: there is deliberately no way to cross anything out.
Pens down. Read your list slowly, then choose one promising next action — not the best imaginable one, just the next one.
Why the pour has no brakes
The rule against crossing anything out is older than the workshop. Alex Osborn, the advertising man who popularised brainstorming, set out its rules in Applied Imagination (1953): quantity first, judgement later, on the theory that a mind busy judging its ideas soon stops having them. The exercise asks you to be two people, the one who pours and the one who judges, one after the other and never at once.
There is some evidence for the patience, too. Researchers who time people producing ideas have long reported a serial order effect: later ideas tend, on average, to be rated more original than early ones. A 2026 study found the effect real but small, and not dependable for any one person, so treat the pour as a good wager rather than a promise. The obvious ideas still have to come out first. They are what you are getting past.