Your First Answer Is Usually Just Your Habit

Over my 35 years as a union electrician, I worked with a lot of different people.

Some were incredibly talented.

Some were experienced, hardworking, and eager to learn.

And some were just plain stubborn.

I remember journeymen who’d get offended if you tried to show them anything.

Okay.

But here’s something I learned over the years.

Having experience doesn’t necessarily mean you’re still learning.

And knowing how to do something doesn’t necessarily mean you know the best way to do it.

I noticed some of those same guys back at the union hall between jobs.

I can’t say why they were out of work.

But their resistance to learning stuck with me.

Because I knew exactly what kind of electrician I wanted on my crew.

Someone who was willing to keep learning. And more importantly, someone who wanted to learn how to teach themselves.

Because that’s a skill that would serve them long after we stopped working together.

I Didn’t Just Want Better Electricians

When I was responsible for a crew, I wanted my journeymen to get better at their jobs.

Of course I did.

We had schedules to meet, work to complete, problems to solve, and standards to maintain.

But I wanted something more for them.

I wanted them to develop the skills they’d need to become foremen themselves.

Not just the technical skills.

The thinking skills.

Because being a foreman isn’t only knowing how to bend conduit, pull wire, install equipment, or read a set of blueprints.

It’s being able to look at a whole project, understand what needs to happen, anticipate problems, coordinate people and resources, and make good decisions.

And quite often, it’s recognizing that the problem you’re looking at isn’t actually the problem you need to solve.

That takes a different kind of thinking.

So I developed a little exercise I’d use when laying out work for my journeymen.

It was simple.

Almost stupidly simple.

But I found it genuinely valuable.

Give Me Three Ways to Do It

When I assigned someone a project, I’d start by explaining what we needed to accomplish.

1. Here’s the work.
2. Here are the constraints.
3. Here are the results we’re trying to achieve.

In leadership circles there’s a concept called commander’s intent.​

Instead of telling someone every move they must make, you give them the mission, the desired outcome, and the boundaries they have to operate within.

That’s essentially what I was trying to do.

Now, let me be clear about one thing, because this is non-negotiable and I don’t want it misread.

I was not asking my journeymen to violate electrical codes, ignore safety standards, or disregard the project specifications.

Those things are mandatory, and independent thinking never means improvising unsafe work.

But within the legitimate ways of accomplishing the job, there were often choices. And that’s exactly where I wanted them to think.

So after explaining the assignment, I’d tell them:

Not one.

Three.

Your First Answer Is Probably Your Habit

The first way someone comes up with is usually the way they already know.

It’s familiar.

It’s comfortable.

It’s what they’ve done before.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.

If you’ve been doing something successfully for years, you probably have good reasons for approaching it that way.

Experience matters.

But experience can also become a trap.

Because sometimes we stop asking whether there’s another way.

We see the project, we recognize something familiar, and our brain immediately jumps to the solution we’ve used a hundred times before.

Problem. Solution. Done.

But what if the conditions are different this time?

What if the constraint isn’t the same?

What if there’s an opportunity you haven’t noticed, because you’d already decided how you were going to proceed before you even looked?

That’s why I wanted a second answer.

The Second Way Gets You Moving

The second way is usually a variation of the first.

Maybe you change the order of operations.

Maybe you use a different tool.

Maybe you reorganize the work or approach it from a different direction.

It’s still pretty close to what you already know.

But you’re starting to loosen your grip on that first solution.

You’re beginning to recognize that there isn’t necessarily only one way to accomplish the assignment.

And that matters — because once you understand that alternatives exist, you’ve opened the door to a different kind of thinking.

You’re no longer simply recalling an answer. You’re evaluating possibilities.

But I didn’t want my journeymen to stop there. I wanted a third way.

The Third Way Makes You Think

This was the part I liked.

By the time someone got to the third approach, they usually had to work a little harder.

They’d already given me the obvious answer.

They’d already modified it.

Now they had to look at the assignment differently.

Maybe they had to reconsider their assumptions.

Maybe they had to question the order of the work.

Maybe they had to think about what another crew was doing.

Maybe they had to ask whether the problem they were trying to solve was even the right problem.

And that’s where things got interesting.

Not because the third idea was automatically better.

Sometimes the first way was still the best. Sometimes the third idea wouldn’t work at all.

But that wasn’t really the point.

The point was developing the habit of looking beyond the first answer.

Because if you only know one way to solve a problem, what happens when that way doesn’t work?

You get stuck. You push harder. You get frustrated. You may even decide the problem is impossible.

But if you’re accustomed to considering alternatives, you have somewhere else to go. You have options. And you’ve learned to ask better questions.

Sometimes Your Problem Isn’t Your Problem

Here’s something I wanted my journeymen to understand as they got more experienced.

The problem you notice first isn’t necessarily the problem actually causing the difficulty.

You might think the issue is that a particular task is taking too long.

But maybe the sequence of work is wrong.

Maybe the materials aren’t where they need to be.

Maybe you’re waiting on another trade.

Maybe the drawings don’t match the site.

Maybe you’ve made an assumption nobody thought to question.

I’m not describing one particular job here. These are the kinds of things a foreman has to hold in his head at once.

Because when you’re responsible for more than your own task, you have to look beyond what’s immediately in front of you. You have to understand how the pieces fit together. You have to see the bigger picture.

And sometimes the more useful question isn’t “how do I do this faster?”

It’s “why am I having to do it this way in the first place?”

That’s a very different question, and it may lead to a very different answer.

Learning How to Teach Yourself

I think one of the greatest gifts a teacher, coach, or leader can give someone is the ability to keep learning without them.

Think about that for a second.

If I teach you how to accomplish one task, I’ve helped you with one task.

But if I teach you how to think through unfamiliar problems, compare alternatives, recognize constraints, and test your assumptions, I’ve given you something you can use for the rest of your life.

It's that whole, "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day..."​

You don’t have to wait for someone to tell you exactly what to do.

You can look at the situation, ask questions, consider alternatives, make a decision, observe what happens, and learn from the result.

That doesn’t mean never asking for help.

It certainly doesn’t mean pretending to know things you don’t.

In electrical construction, ignorance can get people hurt, and knowing when to ask for guidance is part of being a professional.

But there’s a real difference between asking someone to help you understand a problem and expecting them to do all your thinking for you.

I wanted my journeymen to become the first kind of person — someone who could work independently, teach themselves, and someday run a crew of their own without becoming so proud of what they already knew that they stopped learning.

Three Answers, One Better Question

The more I think about that exercise, the more I realize its value wasn’t just in generating three solutions.

It was in what happened between them.

When you force yourself to come up with another approach, you have to examine what you’re assuming.

Those questions reveal things that weren’t obvious when you first looked at the problem.

And sometimes they reveal that your original solution was aimed at a symptom rather than the cause.

That’s why this lesson isn’t limited to construction.

Say you keep clashing with somebody at work, and your instinct is to just avoid them.

That’s your first answer — the familiar one.

A second answer might be a variation: grit your teeth, keep it brief, stay professional.

But a third answer forces the harder question.

Maybe the real issue isn’t them at all. Maybe it’s an unclear boundary, an unspoken expectation, or a process that’s broken — and two people are colliding inside a problem neither of them created.

The third answer isn’t automatically right.

But considering it might help you question the situation itself instead of simply blaming the people caught in it.

If you’re stuck on a recurring problem, your first instinct may be to work harder at the solution you’ve always used.

But maybe that solution is part of why you’re stuck.

Maybe there’s something you haven’t considered.

Maybe you’re asking the wrong question.

The Real Meaning of Experience

I spent a lot of years working with electricians of very different skill levels, and one thing became clear.

The number of years someone has done a job doesn’t tell you how much they’ve actually learned.

Some people have twenty years of experience.

Others have repeated the same year twenty times.

There’s a difference, and I think it comes down to curiosity.

Are you still asking questions?

Are you still willing to learn?

Can someone with less experience show you something useful?

Can you look at a familiar problem and consider an unfamiliar solution?

If the answer is no, your experience may have quietly become a limitation.

If the answer is yes, every assignment becomes another chance to learn, and every problem another chance to improve how you think.

That’s what I was trying to teach my journeymen.

Not just how to finish today’s assignment, but how to prepare themselves for tomorrow’s responsibility.

Not just how to solve problems, but how to see them differently.

And sometimes, that’s how you discover that the problem you thought you had wasn’t your real problem at all.

⚔ The Dojo Drill: Find the Third Way

Think about a problem or project you’re working on right now — something you’ve already decided how to handle.

Before you jump into action, take five minutes and come up with three different approaches.

1. The familiar way. How would you normally handle this? What’s your first instinct?

2. The modified way. What could you change about your usual approach? The sequence, the timing, the tools, the people?

3. The different way. What if you couldn’t use either of your first two approaches? What assumptions would you have to question? What might you find?

Now compare the three. Which best fits the actual requirements and constraints?

And here’s the question that matters most:

What did considering three approaches help you notice that you didn’t see when you had only one?

You don’t have to choose the third way. You might discover your first answer was right all along.

But now you’ve examined it instead of just assuming it was right.

And that’s the habit worth building. Because sometimes the answer isn’t to get better at what you’ve always done.

Sometimes it’s learning to see what you’ve never noticed before.

📚 Leader’s Library

​The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin​

Why?

Josh Waitzkin knows something about learning difficult skills.

As a young chess prodigy whose early life helped inspire Searching for Bobby Fischer, he developed an unusually deep understanding of competitive chess.

Later, he turned his attention to martial arts, becoming a world champion in Tai Chi Push Hands competition.

In The Art of Learning, Waitzkin explores what these seemingly different disciplines taught him about developing expertise.

P.S. Know a martial arts gym owner who’s stressed about money or student numbers?

Do them a favor: send them to The Leader's Dōjō, my website where I help owners get more students and keep them longer with simple systems.

One forward from you could change their gym: The Leader's Dōjō​

Chuck