I found this bit of wisdom at the end of today’s post on The Endeavour, a blog by John D. Cook:

There are no solutions, only trade-offs.

Cook is an applied mathematician and he was writing about scripting languages (a kind of computer programming language). Most of the stuff on Cook’s blog is way over my head but every once in a while I learn something. Ultimately he was discussing using tools to solve problems. One scripting language was small and specialized, the other was more “expressive” (his term), that is, it had more features and thus more power. But that also meant he had to make more choices, and that created more chances to make mistakes. It’s a trade-off—productivity vs. expressiveness.

The solution depends on the problem, or as Cook says, it’s a “matter of tasks and circumstances.” He’s writing about his work, and his little saying up there should best be understood in that context. But it seems to be much more general than that. I suspect we could apply Cook’s dictum to lots of things.

But as I like to say, all generalizations are untrue. Rules-of-thumb like “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” are useful. Handy, even. They can help steer our thinking. If we recognized that a non-trivial problem (something worth solving) might not be solvable that might make us more humble. Less rigid in our thinking. More open to listening, and trying things out. Just because a problem isn’t solvable doesn’t mean things can’t be made better.