Instructor Introduction

Welcome to this course on problem solving and critical thinking. My name is Alex Genadinik and I'll be your instructor. In this video, I'll tell you a little bit about my background in this field, how the course is structured so you know exactly what to expect, and we'll start right away.

Course Goals

My goal for you is to become so confident and skilled at problem solving and critical thinking that any challenge that appears in front of you in the future, you'll not see it as a problem or a challenge. You'll see it as an opportunity. Because when you solve that challenge better than everyone else, your life, your career, your business improves dramatically and exponentially. I'll show you how to create creative solutions to problems that don't just incrementally help you, but help you 10x what your competitors are doing. This is going to improve all of your life, your quality of life, and your career.

Instructor Background

My background in this is I started being a chess player at a very young age, around five or six, and I've been in this field of problem solving since then. During university, I studied problem solving from a different perspective. I was a computer science major, so it was more about logic and numbers. When I graduated, I started problem solving in my career, where there are a lot of unknown variables. Later, instead of just being an engineer, I became a business owner. For the last 20 years, I've been a business owner and I've constantly had to problem solve. How do I reinvent myself? my business? my product? the way I conduct business? All of this improves only after problem solving.

Course Structure

In this course, I'm going to show you exactly how to:

1. Problem Solving: First, we're going to look at problem solving.
2. Critical Thinking: Then we're going to look at critical thinking. You want to evaluate problems in a sophisticated manner so that nobody can trick you. When you look at social media today, the news today, they tell you 'up is down' and 'down is up', and they want to make you believe it. But you want to be strong at thinking independently for yourself, an independent thinker.
3. Creativity in Problem Solving: We're going to look at how to be more creative in your problem solving.
4. Decision Making: I'm going to show you fascinating data-driven decision making that I had to do for my own business years ago. I'll let you practice that same scenario and learn to problem solve in the way that I did. You can actually practice your problem solving for your career, but also for business.

Practical Application

Whatever field you're in, whether you plan to improve your critical thinking and problem solving for school, university, your career, your business or something technical, you'll have the skills. What you don't want is to just learn problem solving and critical thinking in only a few narrow examples, because whenever you step out of those examples, you will feel lost. What you really want is to gain confidence in yourself that you're going to be able to solve problems in any scenario you face for the rest of your life.

Course Outcome

After you take this course, you'll have the skills, you'll have the right mindset, you'll be able to find the right kind of focus. Solve that, and any challenge in the future, you'll say, bring it on. I'm going to solve it better than everybody else. And this challenge will become a way that I'm going to actually outpace all my competition and enhance the quality of my personal life and professional accomplishments.

Welcome to the course. Let's begin.