How do you cope with not being able to solve a problem?

[Theorem.]

I think that above all you have to remember that at the end of the day you are still only human.
Do your best, put in your full effort, use whatever resources are available (and there are always available resources) and keep yourself motivated.

 

[clope023]

Different people have different learning strategies, but I find looking at solved problems to be extremely useful for me. The thing that works for me is to read a *lot* of solved problems, and that's no more "cheating" then having a chess master look at games that have been played or an artist going into an art museum looking at old masters. Once you look at a lot of solved problems, then you start getting a sense of the strategies that are involved in mathematical problem solving.

 

[Ryker]

Just wanted to thank everyone for their input again. And I guess I wasn't (am not) really looking for a way to hack the problems themselves, but just a general philosophy, strategy or a mindset that I could apply to the fact that I am just not capable of solving a specific problem that I think I should. So this topic is more about accepting defeats than it is about avoiding them. From some of the posts it seems I didn't make my point clear enough, but what I wanted to say is that it seems I have imposed myself that, say, getting help for a problem isn't avoiding defeat, because defeat to me isn't not being able to solve the problem per se, but not being able to solve it by myself when I expect to be able to do so.

So, more generally, I was and am not looking for tactics on how to tackle Maths/Physics problems and, similary, not for ways of actually solving the problem, but for ways of dealing with not being able to solve it, when this not being able to solve is taken as an irrefutable fact.

Does it make sense?

 

[Klockan3]

Stop thinking "I should be able to solve this" and just think about the problem instead. If you can't solve it, then it doesn't mean anything other than that you can't solve it. There is a lot of problems I can't solve but there is also a lot of problems I can solve, I just figure that if I need to solve it at some time then I will learn how to solve it sooner or later so it is ok if I can't solve it right now.