Work the Problem
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Andy Weir tells a good story. After Drew and Charu read his first novel, The Martian1, they got the four of us to go see the movie when it came out. When Project Hail Mary2 came out, Drew, Charu, and I read it and loved it. So last week, we got the family back together to go watch Project Hail Mary. It was very well done. Highly recommend!
No spoilers here. I just want to share the premise of each of these two stories. In The Martian, they’re trying to figure out how to get Mark Watney, a stranded astronaut, off of Mars and back to Earth. In Project Hail Mary, an isolated Ryland Grace is trying to figure out how to research black matter in a distant galaxy and send his findings home to save Earth from this same black matter.
Both of these stories center around intense and extended problem solving. Both Mark and Ryland have their pity party moments, but in Finite Bitching3 fashion, they are quick to turn their attention to the task at hand and begin to Work the Problem. Once Mark groks the gravity (no pun intended) of his situation, he says, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option: I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” Well said. Little problems require a little science. Big problems require a shit ton of science. Work the shit out of the problem.
“Work the Problem” is a phrase perhaps most famously used by Gene Kranz, lead flight director for NASA’s Apollo 13 mission. 55 hours and 55 minutes into the Apollo 13 mission, there was a major failure on the spacecraft. At the same time that commander Jim Lovell radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” mission control was already reacting to a whole bunch of simultaneous alerts flashing on screens around the room.
The panic was building, so Gene Kranz worked to settle people down, “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing.” Gene went on to highlight how to keep focused on the problem. “Okay, now let’s everybody keep cool. We got the LM [Lunar Module] still attached. The LM spacecraft’s good, so if we need, to get back home we’ve got a LM to do a good portion of it with.”4
For the next 87 hours, mission control and the astronauts worked together to solve the problem. Gene later described the flow as, “Everybody seemed to be moving in the right direction without being directed.” Lovell celebrated the victory of “Initiative to think outside of the box. When things go wrong, how do we repair them?” These are articulations of Work the Problem at its finest.
Space is probably the most unforgiving environment, so the Martian and Apollo examples are extreme, but the Work the Problem lessons here are broadly applicable. You can probably even put yourself at ease when you encounter any problem by telling yourself, “This can’t be as hard as Watney’s or Kranz’s problem, so I’m sure I can figure it out.”
You have a problem in front of you, and you have time working against you. Focus on the problem at hand, and get to work.
