“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert Einstein

A small thought inspired by this quote.

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Most of us reach for solutions.

It feels like progress.

Something is wrong.
We fix it fast.
Move on.

But most problems don’t yield to fast answers.

They yield to better questions.

Einstein’s ratio wasn’t about slowing down.

It was about proportion.

Fifty-five minutes understanding what’s actually broken.
Five minutes on the fix.

Today we can build faster than ever.

“Move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg once said.

AI lets us do exactly that.

But speed makes Einstein’s lesson more important, not less.

When building becomes easy,
thinking becomes the real work.

Most people reverse the ratio.

They treat the symptom.
Skip the diagnosis.

A slow app isn’t always a code problem.
A confusing feature isn’t always a design problem.

The surface is rarely where the problem lives.

Understanding takes longer.
It also tends to be the only part that matters.

What problem might deserve more thinking?

Better is a direction, not a destination.