So I know after those last few notes you are probably thinking, "Julie, again?" And with that thought, you would be starting a whole new pamphlet. My Karl says I have a gift for doing that. I tell him it is called building suspense. He says it is called making his head hurt. We have agreed to disagree on that one.
You see, finding clues in something that is written or drawn is very different from solving a puzzle made of objects that are simply sitting there in front of you. They may both end with an answer, but your mind has to travel a completely different road to reach it. Reading clues is like listening to someone tell you a story while quietly leaving things out. A physical puzzle is different. It says absolutely nothing. It just sits there staring back at you as if to say, "Well? Are you going to figure me out or not?" I have to admit, I always liked that challenge.
So here we are going to talk about what I mean by that and how I was taught to solve things unlike anyone I personally know. Please remember, I am not saying no one else can do it. I am sure there are thousands of people out there far better than I am. I have simply never met them. Besides, if I ever do meet one, I will probably ask them to teach me something new. Learning has never scared me. Not knowing...that scares me a little.
So let us start with something almost everyone knows, no matter how old you are. The Rubik's Cube. That colorful little monster that sat on shelves for years making perfectly normal people question their own intelligence. I watched adults pick one up, twist it around for fifteen minutes, sigh loudly, set it down, and walk away as though the cube had somehow won the argument. Then ten minutes later they would come back and try again. It was almost funny watching people refuse to let a little plastic cube beat them.
When I finally got one, it took me about an hour to solve it for the very first time. After that, I carried it everywhere. I was probably a little annoying, if I am being honest. I would hand it to people and say, "Go ahead. Mix it up as much as you want." Some of them would smile that smile adults get when they think they are about to teach a kid a lesson. They would twist it until even they had no idea where anything belonged anymore, hand it back, and say, "Good luck."
A few minutes later... Done.
Every single time. So naturally I started wondering something very important: would it ever become too mixed up to solve?
That became my new game. I was no longer trying to solve the cube. I was trying to find its breaking point. Surely there had to be some magical number of twists where it simply gave up and said, "Nope. I live like this now." But it never happened. No matter what anyone did to it, it always came back together.
I thought that was fascinating. Most people looked at the cube and saw confusion. I looked at it and saw that no matter how scrambled it became, the answer was still inside it somewhere. That is a very hopeful thought if you really think about it.
Sometimes our lives feel like someone picked us up and twisted us around until nothing makes sense anymore. But maybe...just maybe...the answer is still there too. We simply have to find the path back to it.
The funny part was I honestly did not know how I was solving it. I could not have sat down and written a manual for someone else. My mind simply stopped seeing a puzzle. It became a track. Layers. Corners. Middles. Yellow cross. Yellow corners. Piece after piece. One step opened another step, and another, until suddenly everything fit together again.
That was the day I realized something I still believe today. Every puzzle has a path. Not just some puzzles. Every puzzle. The trick is finding the path the builder used.
Once I understood that, the Rubik's Cube was never really a puzzle again. It became a journey with the same destination every single time. Follow the path correctly, and you reach the answer. Wander away from the path, and you simply spend more time getting back to where you should have been.
That lesson followed me far beyond toys. It followed me into books. Into mysteries, into our adventures, into life itself.
Now let me bring back something I saw my Karl write in one of his stories because, without even realizing it, he explained puzzles better than almost anyone I know.
"That's what you crazies never get. You write these grand, intricate scripts for the end of the world, but you always leave an emergency exit, a flaw in the design. It's almost set in the plan, Sam, the single way to stop it. The only problem is there's no manual for us simple humans. We have to pick through your rubbish to find the missing key. Today, there was a missing limb. But next time? Next time it might be a talking head in a bluish-green box that will have to be smushed out of power."
I smiled the first time I read that because Karl probably did not even realize what he had just admitted. He admitted there is always a path. Think about that for a second.
Every complicated plan someone creates has to work somehow. If it works, then there must be something making it work. If there is something making it work, then there is also something that can make it stop working. Somewhere inside every giant machine is one tiny bolt. Somewhere inside every lock is one tiny key. Somewhere inside every giant plan is one little choice that keeps the whole thing standing.
That is what we search for. Not the biggest piece. The most important piece. There is a huge difference.
That is why Karl and I rarely spend our time fighting the whole problem. We spend our time looking for the one thing holding the problem together. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it is an object. Sometimes it is a sentence someone forgot they said. Sometimes it is simply one decision made years before that everything else depends on.
Find that the whole puzzle begins to fall apart. Let's now try some more examples of the same idea, and I will be done with puzzles.
Imagine there is a stack of chairs on a table and you need to remove only one, with the chairs left staying in place. How do you even do that? Well, you have to imagine how they were put there, and how they were kept from falling as the puzzle was being built to be solved. Then you think about the rules you were given. Then you can find the key to the whole thing. You see, I did not say anything about how you must remove one, and they still stay in place. Your mind keeps going to the whole stack and how they will stay and what I should do. However, if you look at the puzzle in the boundaries you were given, I take off the top chair and the puzzle is solved. There were no rules that said you had to take one from the middle, but your mind added that because it was a pile. That is the sneaky part about puzzles. Half the time they are not testing how smart you are. They are testing how many extra rules you quietly invent all by yourself. You almost become your own opponent without realizing it.
So let me give you another one because I think examples are much easier than me waving my hands around trying to explain what goes on inside my funny little brain. Imagine someone hands you a long rope tied into a giant knot and says, "Untie it without cutting it." Most people grab the biggest knot they can see because, well, it is the biggest. It must be the problem, right? Maybe. Maybe not. What if that giant knot only became tight because one tiny little loop near the end was pulled first? If you find that little loop and loosen it, suddenly the giant knot almost unties itself. You were never fighting the knot at all. You were only looking for the thing that made the knot possible. That is how so many real problems work. We spend years wrestling with the giant mess sitting in front of us when the real answer is one little choice that happened at the very beginning. Find the beginning, and the ending usually becomes much easier to understand.
Here is another one I always liked to think about. Imagine someone builds a tower out of little wooden blocks and tells you, "Make the whole tower fall by removing only one block." Almost everyone immediately looks at the bottom because they are thinking about gravity. That makes perfect sense. But what if there is one block halfway up that is supporting almost all the weight on one side? Pull that one instead, and the entire tower comes down while the bottom stays exactly where it was. Again, the puzzle was never asking you to find the biggest piece. It was asking you to find the important piece. There is a huge difference between those two things, and if you can teach yourself to look for the important thing instead of the biggest thing, you will solve problems much faster than you ever thought possible.
That is one of the biggest lessons my parents ever taught me. Stop looking at size. Start looking at purpose. Every piece is there for a reason. Every rule is there for a reason. Every choice was made for a reason. If you can discover the reason, you are already halfway to discovering the solution.
I will even give you one more because, honestly, they are fun. My Karl says I cannot pass up a good puzzle. He is right. If someone walks into a room with a locked treasure chest and another person walks in carrying a giant hammer, almost everyone watches the hammer because it looks exciting. Me? I watch the lock. Why? Because someone expected the lock to stop people. That means someone also expected there to be a key somewhere. Now, maybe the key is gone. Maybe it was hidden. Maybe it was never a real key at all. But whoever built the puzzle believed there was a way to open it, and that means my job is not to smash the chest. My job is to think like the person who built it. Once you begin thinking like the builder instead of the person trapped by the builder, puzzles become much friendlier. They almost start talking to you.
Now, before anyone starts calling me a puzzle whisperer, no, they do not actually talk. If they did, I would probably spend my afternoons having conversations with padlocks and board games, and poor Karl would finally have proof that I had completely lost my marbles. Although...if a Rubik's Cube ever does start talking to me, I promise I will let you all know first.
That was exactly how my parents started teaching me when I was only around eight years old. They did not begin with giant mysteries or complicated riddles. They started with little metal nail puzzles that looked completely impossible. You know the ones. Two bent pieces of metal hooked together in ways that make you wonder whether they were secretly welded while you were not looking. I loved those things. At first I pulled and twisted and probably made all the same faces everyone else makes. Then my mom would smile. Dad would smile. Neither one of them would help me. They would simply ask one question.
"How do you think they put it together, Jules?"
Everything changed the day I stopped asking how to pull them apart and started asking how someone put them together in the first place. Well, that does it. My next pamphlet will be my last. I hope you read through all of them and started a life hack, so someday you will be the person with the answers- my official new sleuths, or as Karl always tells me, wizards-Toodles.
I was watching an old movie, and he said Tallheo? I am wondering if I should change Toodles. Any opinion out there? until next time Talle-Ho... Hmmm,, I am thinking Toodles...
