"People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
But, Bucky, people accept the usual ways of doing things precisely because they don't give any thought to them. They assume that many others before them have thought everything through and discovered the best ways of doing everything.
And those "many others before them?" They thought (or, more accurately, didn't think seriously) the same way.
Most of us seem to have a natural tendency to believe that because we do something one way, that it must be the right way. And that if we were taught something one way, that it must be the best way.
In my personal life, I have been baffled many times over the past few years about how to proceed with a problem, usually a problem about how to repair something without having the tools and skills that a professional would have ready.
While I am fussing and ranting about how luck has dealt me another bad blow, concerned that I might have to invest in a new object to replace the one I couldn't repair, my wife comes along and suggests that I try something a little different.
You should understand that my wife is a very smart woman who disguises herself in the clothing of a court clown so that no one will know how knowledgeable she is. Her wisdom slips out most often when I am perplexed with a problem. Her solution is fast, cheap and easy to implement.
Sometimes I'm a dummy at night, unable to find the answer, but by morning I have figured out how to solve that complex problem that seemed intractable the previous evening.
It's true that taking a break from a disturbing problem and looking at it later often sheds new light on its possible solution. It's also true that the human brain hashes and rehashes over our daytime problems while we sleep, often resulting in the solutions presenting themselves fully formed when we wake up.
As a side note, this also explains why writers often wake in the middle of the night with a great idea and a need to commit it to print right away.
Looking at conventional problems in a different way doesn't mean just staring harder at them. It means looking away and thinking about something else for a while.
It means rethinking causes that might not have been considered before. Often times knowing a cause (or newly-considered causes) of something will give insight into its solution.
The key word in the Buckminster Fuller quote is "think." Just fussing and worrying about a problem is not thinking. Thinking about a problem is a process, like a journey that we travel many times until we finally discover the right way to reach our destination.
Sometimes that solution is quite different from the conventional way of getting there. If it is, those who take the conventional ways will object, mostly because they have not been through the same thinking process that caused us to reach the better solution.
Those who find the best solutions often work alone for a long time until others catch up with what they discovered.
Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to show you new, simple, cheap and easy ways to solve big problems you thought were unsolvable.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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Comments: 15
Thanks, John, for the suggestion. If one or more wheels are broken, the broken pieces could be jammed under the door, preventing it from sliding.
Thanks, Linda, for your addition about the AHA! moments. Don't you find that you just have to get up and do something about them at 3 a.m. then? It's annoying, but I do it because I will have forgotten whatever I needed to remember by morning if I don't get up.
With people problems, I find (a fairly recent discovery, I confess) that forgiveness and a bad memory help greatly.
No matter how stupid, how mean, how thoughtless or how hurtful people have been in the past, they forget about their sins quickly. It's easier for me to forget them as well, as most of the time they are decent people (under their evil, fur-covered hearts).
Forget the book, Bill, you've found another calling: Handy-man.
Lydia, you story reminds me of the leader and follower sheep. The leader has the hardest job because she has to find new pasture, safe refuge or the way home. But she always has her eyes looking forward. The follower sheep has nothing more to think about than to keep folowing the ass in front of them.
Candida, my guess is that Justin can see a whole process in his mind, from beginning through to the end. David, on the other hand, can only see how Justin would begin and how the object is supposed to look at the end. David can't see the whole process, so he falsely assumes that the process will fail.
There's a lesson there about assumptions. The safest thing we can assume in life is that all assumptions are wrong.
I am a master with Automotive Goop, as my wife will attest.
Now I can see that every community I know lacks those few special people who can fix almost anything or build some relatively minor things that people need. Any unemployed person could make a decent living as a handyman or handywoman.
Handywomen might be better because they would have a woman's natural knack of multi-tasking, a skill that most men find difficult.
Sharing of information is always the est way to learn, provided that one does not depend too much on one source.
For anyone who reads this far down the page, Gather eventually did send me notification of the first two comments above--a day later.
I have a friend who has been called a genius (and not even by himself). He thinks slowly and methodically and takes hours to days to reach solutions. Microsoft, among others, pays him large sums of money when he finds solutions to problems their huge stable of developers thought were intractable.
I will guess that David finds the best solutions, ones that seem good even years later, by taking so long to think things through. Justin, on the other hand, can see relationships between things that the rest of us can't.
What most people don't realize is that the teaching profession and its methodologies are as young as the medical profession. Both have been around for millennia, but both only really formed up in an organized fashion just over a century ago.
Teaching is very much a "Do as you are told" kind of employment. Independent thinking is not allowed, unless a teacher independently thinks the same thing as the school administration guidelines dictate. That is, what a child needs means very little in relation to what the ivory tower education mavens believe a child should have.
'Turning It Around' endeavours to change that. But it's a slow, uphill course.
The ugly truth, Zenith, is that teachers are not taught what they need to be able to guide their young charges properly. More importantly, they are also not give the approval to do so or the tools to accomplish the task they way it needs to be done.