This TV Show Can Teach Problem-Solving Better Than Any Coding Class
27 Oct 2025 #codingYesterday, I shared a surprising way to improve at coding: watching a TV show.
It wasn’t Silicon Valley or Mr. Robot or any other TV show featuring hackers. It was a show about doctors. I never thought hospital drama could teach problem-solving.
Watch House M.D.
Let me introduce you to Gregory House, the protagonist.
He’s not a regular doctor. He doesn’t like patients. He doesn’t wear a white coat or use a stethoscope either. He’s even sick and under constant medication. Weird, right?
But he gets the most complex, rarest cases because he’s a brilliant problem solver. He even runs his own department at the hospital.
Every episode is a masterclass in how to solve complex problems.
The #1 rule of problem-solving
There’s a line Dr. House says almost all the time:
“Everybody lies.”
That’s why Dr. House doesn’t like to see patients. He only trusts brain scans, blood tests, and other exams.
Let me ask you this:
How many times have you received a bug report and Customer Support claimed they had verified logs, reproduced steps, and validated user data… And after hours of debugging, you realize the real problem was something they had claimed to have checked in the first place? Arrggg!
If you ask Dr. House, everybody lies:
- End users lie.
- Documentation lies.
- Customer Support lies.
- Other engineers lie.
- Even you and I lie.
Always trust but verify.
That’s Dr. House’s #1 rule to solve problems.
House M.D has conflict and drama with excellent storytelling. But it also teaches powerful problem-solving lessons. I expand on what Dr. House has to teach us as coders in my book, Street-Smart Coding: 30 Ways to Get Better at Coding.
In my book, I suggest watching a TV show and hanging out in cafes to become a better coder. Yes! Because coding isn’t just syntax and speed. It’s also thinking like a doctor with complex cases.