Reply To: Exercise 2: 5 Unsolved Problems

by Olivia Ong
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Home Forums Initiative Course 2024 Exercise 2: 5 Unsolved Problems Reply To: Exercise 2: 5 Unsolved Problems

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Olivia Ong
Participant

Method Initiative Exercise 2

A list of five problems, clearly written in at most a few sentences each, plus a rudimentary solution for each, also in a sentence or two.

Field of Interest: Minimalism, decluttering, organization
1. Problem: Parents feel overwhelmed with managing their homes, which bleeds into their work and overall sense of satisfaction with life. Solution: Reducing inventory and reorganizing the home to support their flow of activity may help to increase efficiency in the home, making it feel like a restful place to be, and improving the flow of activity, freeing up bandwidth to work on higher level tasks.

2. Problem: Children under 12 feel overwhelmed by decision paralysis when it comes to toys, clothes, and memorabilia, often resulting in overattachment to their belongings. Solution: Highly simplifying a child’s most common environments leads to less decision-making fatigue and in turn, higher satisfaction. Leading parents through this process to support their kids, and then circling back with parents on the impact to their kids.

3. Problem: Teenagers feel emotionally and physically attached to belongings or to the action of acquiring trendy things in an effort to feel connected with their sense of self and identity that they are cultivating amongst their peers, but they may not truly feel confident in themselves and ultimately feel disconnected from others. Solution: Introducing a values exercise to teenagers on finding their core motivating values may help them to further understand themselves and re-evaluate the basis on which they connect with others.

4. Problem: Working professionals want to combat procrastination but often feel helpless or powerless to do so in keeping up with the grind of life. Solution: Reducing the number of things they need to do often frees up more time to do things that they have set on the back burner for a long time, eliminates unimportant problems, and unsuspectingly increases the efficiency of getting tasks done.

5. Problem: Women feel overwhelmed with household management and are disproportionately impacted by visual clutter, but often feel helpless, powerless, and alone in combatting the problem. Solution: Helping women to body double or find/obtain a body double in getting the ball rolling can help them gain agency in starting the onion peeling process of turning their environment into one that truly supports their flow of life.

6. Problem: Environmentally conscious adults who want to reduce their inventory may feel helpless at the lack of knowledge, lack of time, and lack of resources/accessibility concerning recycling or reducing/eliminating waste. Solution: Obtaining resources and proactively teaching the community about ways to reduce, reuse, or recycle items that are often clutter but are not commonly recycled or dealt with can improve accessibility of removing certain items for people in a way that is win-win for them and the environment.

Field of Interest: Relationships, self-awareness, loneliness

1. Problem: The retired and elderly often feel lonely in their older age as their time with themselves increase and their time with their family or others decreases. They may feel marginalized by their families or societies. Solution: Help them find or create the community that they want to be a part of and connect them with folks who could use their advice or company.

2. Problem: Single working professionals who move for work often feel lonely in a new place and can find it difficult to connect with folks locally or to create/find a sense of community. Solution: Teach people to invite others into their lives or proactively seek that which they are looking for.

3. Problem: Children feel frustrated when they are in conflict with other children. Solution: Help children practice the skill of identifying and naming their emotions and contextualizing situations with ‘When you, I feel’, as well as practicing the skill of asking affirmatively for what they want.

4. Problem: People who struggle with friendship feel misunderstood by others and disconnected from people in general. Solution: Introduce methods for ‘being a friend first’ – the three question method I cultivated with one of my best friends, exercising genuine curiosity and interest in others, and Brene’s Brown’s practice of empathy.

5. Problem: Working professionals often feel lonely and isolated when handling hard things. Solution: Introduce the best friend voice, Simon Sinek’s rule of ‘never crying alone’

Post-exercise Reflection

How hard was it to identify problems?
Soon after class, it seemed very easy for me to identify problems in the inventory management/minimalism/decluttering space. I was planning to post my homework within a day or two of class. However, I soon got stuck on my second topic. This is opposite of what happened with coming up with fields. My second field came to me before my first did. Yet again contrary to what I think would have happened, I almost feel like the secondary field has more variety and more robust ideas.

What’s fascinating is that during this week as I’ve been pondering these exercises, I caught up with my old 6th grade science teacher who once told me he had several friends leave the university he was working at when we had connected who started their own practical skills school or university. He’d mentioned in our last conversation in 2020 that he’d connect me with them on the premise of my involvement and work in financial literacy, but things got lost in the follow up. Reading the book and starting these exercises has led me to feel like initiative ought to be a life skill as much as financial literacy. I had reached back out to him in hopes to reconnect and follow up with those contacts. Out of nowhere, teaching initiative or creating curriculum seemed to appear as a third field of interest, but I am not restarting the process quite yet with this third field so I don’t amplify the quantity of homework I need to do each week. One could say I’m attempting to combat my tendency of filling my plate with more than I can chew.

Was it easy or hard to see them from the perspective of the people they affect?
I think it was relatively easy to see the problems from the perspective of the people they affect as I leaned on my own experiences and issues, as well as those I’d observed in people around me.

Did it get easier with practice?
Yes and no. I think practice and repetitions definitely help. Chewing on things for a while also helps.

Do you think your problems and solutions have much chance to become viable projects?
I’m unsure of how much a chance there is that these ideas will become viable projects. I’m giving my best effort to do the exercise without judging the ideas and trusting that the process will either help to refine the ideas or completely scrap them.

Miscellaneous reflection:
I feel like emotional awareness helps with minimalism/inventory management and environmental sustainability. I also feel that minimalism helps with cultivating emotional awareness. These fields feel interrelated to me. Throw in the idea of teaching initiative and in some ways I have a hard time feeling like I can separate out these topics because of how interdependent they feel to me.

On RJ’s sharing:
In retrospect of hearing RJ’s talk now almost a week ago as I write this, I think what stood out to me the most were two things. One was that he, like other alumni, also felt way more empowered after finishing the class. Two was that not only did he have a successful project that he saw through to completion, he also decided to terminate the project after a certain point. I believe his experience points to the idea that it’s okay to succeed and end something that was good, just as it’s okay to fail at something and leave it be. I think both can be fears that cripple people from taking action.

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