Think of It Like a Geometry Problem

When I was preparing for the university entrance exam in Turkey, I fell in love with analytical geometry.

If you know the exam, you know geometry is different from the other subjects. You cannot get through it on memorization alone. You have to be a little creative. You’d get a triangle with a circle inscribed in it, or some configuration that looks completely stuck, and the way to solve it is not to apply a formula. It’s to draw one line. Find an angle. Rotate something in your head. And suddenly, through that one move, you can calculate everything.

I always loved that. There’s something satisfying about the way geometry works. Once you see the right line, the angles fall into place, the side lengths follow, and the whole thing just opens up.

I still think about this whenever I’m stuck on something. I have a few notes I come back to, and one of them is just: think of it like a geometry problem.

Because that’s what being stuck usually feels like. You’re staring at something and you see nothing. No way in. No obvious move. And the instinct is to stare harder, to try to force it. But in geometry, forcing it doesn’t work. You have to try a different line. Draw something that wasn’t there before. Approach from a different angle, literally.

The moment you do, the problem doesn’t just get easier. It becomes obvious. You wonder why you couldn’t see it before.

I think this applies to almost anything. A business problem that looks intractable. A conversation you don’t know how to have. A decision where every option seems wrong. Most of the time you’re not missing information. You’re missing a line. One shift in perspective and the whole thing unlocks.

Draw the line. Find the angle. The rest follows.