According to a famous legend, the ancient land of Phrygia (in what is now modern-day Turkey) was without a king. An oracle proclaimed that the next man to enter the city in an oxcart would become its king.

Soon after, a man named Gordius rolled into Phrygia on an oxcart with his wife and son and was swiftly proclaimed king of the land.

He dedicated the oxcart to the gods and tied it to a post in the new capital city of Gordium with an extraordinarily complex knot.

The Gordian Knot became a legend: Believed to be unsolvable, the oracles would proclaim that whoever could solve the knot would go on to rule all of Asia.

Countless would-be rulers tried and failed to solve the unsolvable knot, until a 22-year-old King Alexander III of Macedon arrived in Phrygia in 333 B.C. early in his ambitious campaign against the Persian Empire.

Aware of the legend, Alexander studied the knot carefully, but was unable to determine a solution. Suddenly, he drew his sword and cut the knot in half with one powerful blow.

It was a bold, decisive, unconventional action in the face of complexity—an emblem of thinking differently when traditional approaches fail.

The young king would later become known as Alexander the Great, and for good reason, as he would go on to conquer and rule much of Asia Minor, just as the oracle's prophecy had foretold.

But this story is more than just an interesting history lesson:

It's a perfect story of something called functional fixedness.

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias where a person is unable to see something outside of its traditional or intended function.

In the case of the Gordian Knot, the fixed assumption was simple:

A knot must be untied.

The fixed assumption defined and limited the options of those attempting to solve the problem.

Rather than being trapped, Alexander challenged the fixed assumption—metaphorically (and literally) cutting straight through it.

Every single day, we face countless Gordian Knots in our own lives. Difficult, intimidating, complex problems that appear unsolvable through traditional approaches.

We're trained to believe that if we apply careful, linear, methodical effort, that we'll eventually break through. But with certain problems, the traditional approach grounded in traditional assumptions can just keep us stuck.

If you find yourself facing such a problem, try asking some of these questions to break free from functional fixedness and see it differently:

• Am I solving the right problem, or just the first one I noticed?
• What constraints am I treating as fixed that might be flexible?
• What would I do if I wasn't afraid of being wrong or judged?
• What if I tried the opposite of what I've been trying?
• How would someone in a completely different field solve this?
• Am I trying to untie something I could just cut through?
• If this were a puzzle or game, how would I approach it differently?
• If this were someone else's problem, what advice would I give them?

They may be uncomfortable or challenging, but your next breakthrough is found in the answer to one of those questions.

The answers you seek are found in the questions you avoid. Remember that.