April 6th, 2012Top StoryOverthinking and Your Child-Like MindBy Aen Tan
Have you seen the Bollywood film 3 Idiots? It's the highest-grossing Bollywood film of all time in India about the adventures of three college engineering students. One of the scenes left an impression on me.
* Let me clarify that I am aware this space pen story is an urban myth. I am only using it as a storytelling device and for some humor (at least for me and the audience in the theatre who laughed at the scene). It made me think about how we overthink which led to this post. Whether it is true or not is besides the point. As the children we once were, growing up was a process of becoming adults. Not only biologically but also mentally. We learned to be responsible, to pay the bills, to get things done and we learned the complex world of adulthood. To become adults we had to lose our tantrums, silliness, our childhood. And we lost our minds. Our child-like minds. The mind of a child is the greatest gift we will ever receive. As embryos in our mothers' womb, our heart, the first organ to develop only to power the next organ—the developing brain which is soon making a quarter of a million new neurons every minute. In the first 10 years of life, our infant brain will have made billions and billions of connections. It is a supercharged engine for learning and creativity. Yet by adulthood we have lost most of this creativity. We now think like adults. That is we think too much and our thoughts are too influenced by our knowledge. We need to get back our ability to think like kids again. How? Where online would you find a lot of smart and knowledgeable people? Quora of course. I really like to visit Quora and learn from subject matter experts showing off their wits and expertise. Though sometimes they overthink and complicate problems with complicated answers. Many times people are just trying to show off how clever they are with rocket science. Like this question on Quora. The most popular answer for the question before I answered involved calculations with compasses, concentric circles, Pythagorean theorem and square roots. I have no idea what a concentric circle is, let alone cooks in a pizza kitchen. And who keeps compasses in a kitchen? But since it's the most popular answer I suppose overthinking is popular in Quora. I imagined myself with no mathematical knowledge, a cook good with my hands, in a hot and humid kitchen faced with this problem. What would I do? Turns out that the better solution is much simpler and would only required a piece of string and a pen at the very least. Shouldn't be too hard to find in a kitchen. And so I offered my answer. All you have to do is circle a string around the pizza to cut a length equal to the pizza circumference. Then fashion a divider of some sort or even use your thumb and index finger. Adjust your thumb and finger and wrap the string eleven times equally around them. This effectively divides the string into eleven equal parts. Use a pen and mark the string. Circle the string around the pizza again and cut using the markings as guides. My answer received more than a hundred votes, went on to become the most voted and the question was made a Best Source. Conjuring complex mathematical equations may make you look smart but to become truly creative you need to be able to liberate your mind from the the shell of knowledge, education and adultification you have accumulated. Only then can you think like a child again. Answer to the numbers questionThe question has nothing to do with mathematics. Look for the closed loops or shapes in each number and count them. In 0, 6, 8 and 9. 8 has two of them. 2581 has two. The answer is 2. Overthinking | Principia Arbiter Aen writes about his design philosophy at Principia Arbiter and designs software products for his startup Instrumentry and clients. He can use chopsticks with both hands. Want to see your work here? Send an email to submissions@lifehacker.com!  |
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