Several years ago, I watched THE MARTIAN with my wife. The movie follows the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is left stranded on Mars after his crew mistakenly believes he has been killed during a violent storm. The film showcasesWatney's gradual, painful realization of just how bad his situation is. But then we're shown a series of tipping points that each drive Watney's relentless pursuit of survival as he uses his particular knowledge, outlier ingenuity, and frugal resourcefulness to overcome numerous challenges, find a way to communicate with Earth, and ultimately return home. After Watney returns home (spoiler alert), he attributes his survival to the following maxim:
"If you solve enough problems,
you get to come home."I'm no Martian but have found this rule to be generally true in desperate times. I've modified Watney's rule to fit my own non-Martian experiences: "If you solve enough problems one at a time,then you are likelier to come home (than not)."Sometimes, my survival has depended on creating a detailed list and then working each item on the list as if it were the only item on the list. The Tao te Ching says something similar:"Treat simple thingsas if they are difficult."If you treat simple things as if they are difficult, then you are doing the simple thing carefully. Although a fictional character, Watney survives because he wasn't dismissive of any one thing that linked to the next one thing until he found himself to be a survivor.
