Magic Bullet In Word: Fill & Download for Free

Richard Feynman famously recommended a three-step process for solving difficult problems:Write down the problem.Think very hard.Write down the answer.Feynman was exaggerating, of course, largely to make himself look good, but his advice does have a core of truth: There is no magic bullet.I would replace the word “Think” in step 2 with “Work”, to make it clear that just rattling idea around in your head is almost never enough (even for Feynman). “Work very hard” includes things like “Try the easy stuff first, even though it probably won’t work” and “Read everything” and “Read everything again” and “Assume everything you read is wrong and convince yourself otherwise” and “Assume everything you write is wrong and convince yourself otherwise” and “Talk to / work with other people” and “Be ready to fail and get up again” and “Work through all the pesky details” and “Challenge your own assumptions” and “Write the code” and “Do the experiments” and “Redo the experiments” and “Get the right data” and “Listen to other people (yes, even Referee #2)” and even “Go back to step 1 and change the problem”.In short: The same way everyone else solves difficult problems.

If I claimed that my marriage of 57 years is perfect there would be few who would argue.Do we fight? Rarely. Did we ever fight? Oh, yeah. It’s part of adapting to life together.In his excellent fantasy, The Screwtape Letters, C.S.Lewis wrote a series of letters from Screwtape, an under-secretary in the lowerararchy of Hell (well, it could hardly be a hierarchy, could it?) to his nephew, Wormwood, a junior tempter on Earth. Wormwood’s targets were a young man and his mother, who shared the same house.One of the things Screwtape said was, “When one of them suggests going on an outing make sure the other always agrees without argument. Don’t let them raise any objections. That way, it’s possible to have them both doing something that neither of them wants to do, and having both feel self-righteous about it.”Of course, in a marriage we are going to have different points of view about many things. We are not the same person. We are going to have different needs and different desires. We are going to have different ideas about raising the kids. We are going to differ about the best way to budget a finite income.So we sometimes fight.,Lynne and I stumbled on a magic bullet in the first year of our marriage. Neither one of us EVER demands that the other apologise. So many family disputes are prolongued because one partner demands an apology from the other who resents having to give it. Sure, the apologies do come in our situation but they’re not always in words—they may be a touch, or a cuddle, or a kiss on the forehead. Anything really.But if banning apologies was a magic bullet, in 2000 we discovered a magic Cruise missile. We bought a dog.Zoe quickly established a pecking order. Lynne was top dog, Zoe was number two, I got to feed her and open doors on demand.On the rare occasion (and they are rare) that voices were raised, Zoe would stand alongside Lynne and bark at me. She guaranteed that every argument would dissolve in laughter.We lost her a few months ago at age seventeen, but if we felt like raising our voices these days I’m sure the thought of her spectre coming back and filling the room with ghostly woofs would still bring a smile.

“Hey everybody. Give me a magic bullet because I’m too lazy to do the right thing.” Know how you maintain a healthy weight?Stop using the words “junk food”. There are no junk foods. There are junk eating habits. There are foods that you should eat regularly. There are foods you should eat sparingly. This isn’t magic and it isn’t new.Oh, and you still should exercise. Don’t want to? Fine. That’s on you. You can still have a healthy weight but to be healthy, if you are able bodied, you should exercise. Given that you’re too lazy to do that and that you want a simple magic trick to having a healthy body, I highly doubt you’ll do either.Oooh! Maybe get one of those magic cleanse things! That’ll do it.