I was struggling quite a lot today with an algorithm challenge on LeetCode called ”Generate Parentheses”. It was hard enough that after trying for 2 hours, I decided it’d be for the better to look for solutions and learn from them.

But the solution I found, which was good, was not easy to understand at all! As you can imagine, I felt pretty dumb; here I was, admitting defeat and looking at the solution, and I couldn’t even understand that!

Ok, I did understand it in the end, but only after I put my self-loathing aside and focused on breaking down the recursive algorithm staring at my face. There, I suddenly recalled a great quote from Derek Sivers that I’d heard on the Tim Ferriss Show podcast:

“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” Derek Sivers

Information is useless until we sit down and make an effort to make sense of it. The key to crossing the chasm is action, not information.