Life is a race, a huge horse race. Why horse you say?
because horses are trained by humans and bred to battle without even knowing
why. If they aren’t quick enough the jockey whips on the horse’s butt and
forces the poor fellow to give his best. So are we humans not horses? We get
trained by other humans to race (maybe parents teachers), Punished if we don’t
work hard and pushed between hundreds of others (also racing) to get what? Half
of the poor fellows don’t know why are they are being pushed, just told that it
will help you in future. It is really sad to see, especially in India, the
pressure on youth to succeed. So lets not discuss the problem here, let’s get on
to the solution.
First we analyse what is needed to succeed, how to be
different from others and also follow the passion, how to really work hard so
that we know what’s in the end of that race and also enjoy it. By “enjoying” I don’t
mean having the pleasure of racing but to get that motivational drive, the will
to race and the will to actually see things objectively rather than
emotionally; to be free of fear and unknown consequences. To be prepared for
the worst case scenario.
So basic ingredient needed is the power to learn and this is
eventually what I will be talking about because answering the above things is
not my area of expertise, But now that I have broken down the problem you may
feel that the answer will be much more simpler.
That’s what most of the self help books do, they break it
down for you and make you understand things that were already there but because
they connect some different dots of your mind, you feel amazed, thinking “Why
didn’t I think like this before?” and I am going to tell you why.
Recently, as I was lurking on YouTube, I came across this lecture
of Barbara Oakley on learning. She is a Professor of Engineering at Oakland University,
and to tell you in short, knows a hell lot of things about learning. She told
some common tricks to learn, like learning by understanding and repetition, But
because you learn something in the focused state of mind, it gets embedded
deep, something like a pattern of already connected dots on the brain, each dot
having some fact and link to other dot. They are so notable that when we think
about what we have learned, our brain goes from one dot to another in the exact
same way, and that is where our problem arises.
To really understand what I mean by dots and learning and
brain, I will ask you a question, a puzzle and through this puzzle explain you
the pattern. If you answer the puzzle, fair enough, but if you don’t then you
will for sure have the feeling “Why did’nt I think this way?”
And the puzzle is
A man and his son meet a car crash, The father dies and his
son is taken to the hospital, where the doctor examines the boy and shouts “Hey,
he is my son!” How is this possible.
If you get the answer fair enough, but for those who didn’t
get the answer, will be amazed how simple the answer can be.
The answer is of course , the doctor was his mother, a
female doctor. But “Why didn’t I Think it before?”, How can you not know, It is
because the dots(patterns) built deep inside the brain are locked to the same
links and do not take the path of elsewhere, that’s why people who practice these puzzles have a
higher probability to see things in a different way and that’s why most
interviews are based on these puzzles. Because the world needs solutions to
many different problems and those who see them (problems) in a different way
are the ones most likely to solve them in a smart way.
In general, when we
solve these problems we often take the problem as a whole and think of it as a
story, The key here is to use Divide and conquer Technique and really think of
any problem not as a whole, but as a combination of many different facts. The
next step would be to make scenarios, the cases which can be entirely different
from what the problem is but when atlast you have done all the effort, you will
see that when you join the different cases
of different parts together, it will actually make things more clearer, more
simpler and smart.
To summarize it up, if you isolate the dots(the facts) and
see all their connections one by one, then if you are facing any problem in the
entire world, you may not get the answer but after seeing the solution you will never feel “Why didn’t I Think
of this before?”
because either the answer will contain facts that are not known to you or you have not taken all the facts you knew in the cases.
Manik Narang
