Lateral Thinking

When I was reading this book, I was reminded of my school — a place that encouraged rote learning over actual teaching. When I first went to such a school, I was extremely impressed by how quickly and thoroughly most of the students were able to memorize things. Personally, I’d always memorized laboriously, but retained little. I continued being impressed until I brought a problem to some of them. “Look.” I said, “If you change this, and bring that in, doesn’t that imply this result?” They looked at me as if I were speaking Sanskrit. Turned out that they had simply memorized the formulae and while they knew how to apply the formulae to solve a problem, they had no idea what the formulae meant or how they were arrived at or how they could be changed.

Because of the education we receive, when we’re faced with a problem our immediate thought is — “Oh there’s only one correct answer to this. Better follow this sequence of steps that I’ve been told is the correct way.” But in reality, there’s never just one correct answer! Let me explain using this classic problem. There are six eggs in the basket. Six people each take one of the eggs. How can it be that one egg is left in the basket? Now, if I asked you this question, what would your answer be? Maybe you decide to take the most obvious approach and say — “It’s impossible! Six people take six eggs the basket’s obviously empty.” (vertical) Or maybe you come up with something like — “The last person waits for the egg to hatch and grow into a chicken and lay an egg and so there’s an egg left in the basket.” (horizontal) One idea uses the obvious logic; the other idea is technically possible but incredibly improbable — but both of those do make sense and that’s why I’m not saying they’re wrong! But instead of thinking horizontally or vertically — why not think laterally? A solution that is logical and easy to execute. The five men pick up five eggs and the last man picks up the basket with the egg inside it! Another fascinating problem is this one: A boat has a ladder that’s ten feet long, and hangs off the side of the boat, with its last two feet submerged in water. If the ocean tide rises five feet, how much of the ladder will be underwater? The most common answer is seven feet. But obviously, as the ocean rises, so will the boat! The ladder will always be only two feet underwater. A critical thinker might arrive at the same result using logic but a lateral thinker will arrive at the result faster — not because he analyses the science behind the question but instead spots the attempt at misconstruction.

Everyone’s born creative! Creativity isn’t something you learn. Becoming creative doesn’t involve learning anything — it involves unlearning that traditional approach you were taught in school. School taught me that if you dig a hole deep enough, you’d get to water. De Bono taught me that it’s just easier to buy a bottle of Aquafina. Lateral thinking is a skill that is just so incredibly important! Interviewers don’t ask candidates to use Stokes’ theorem to integrate the surface integral of a curve, they ask them questions like how a man became a millionaire by buying rice at 1$ a pound and selling it a 0.05$ a pound. Throw the step-by-step logic in the trash and adapt to the creative approach of lateral thinking!

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