When I was student at MIT, I learned an important lesson from one of my personal heroes, Amy Smith. She's a hero because she invented the "screenless hammer mill" when farmers in Senegal were struggling with the process of separating rocks from grains when making flour. Expensive screens broke all too easily and were hard to replace in poor remote rural villages. Her invention, which was recognized by the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, looked at the existing problem at a new angle. Instead of screens, she used airflow to separate unground grain and rocks from flour. By applying simple aerodynamics, she eliminated the need for screens altogether, and increased grinding rates by 60 times.
This story has served me well in my start-up career. Whenever I get stuck on a problem, all I need to do is stop fixating on my current solution and redefine the problem instead. Smith looked at the problem from a different perspective, which lead to a solution outside of the box. Similar stories can be distilled into useful pieces of advice that have also helped me along the way:
1. Accept the fact that you are inherently lucky. There is a story about a research experiment that involved two types of subjects. One group self-declared themselves as unlucky; the other believed that they were very lucky in life. Both were given newspapers, and were asked to count the number of pictures from cover to cover.
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