Many, many years ago there lived a little boy who showed a great aptitude for numbers. He loved numbers very much and was able to learn how to add and multiply even before he was old enough to go to school.
When he was old enough to enter school he found himself presented with a question one day. His teacher wanted to give the pupils an assignment that would take them some time to finish during the evening at home. The question was, quite simply:
“Add all of the numbers, from one to one hundred.”
The children groaned thinking about how long it would take, and how there was going to be lots of chances to make errors along the way. Imagine having to add all one hundred numbers together? The child prodigy, however, was able to provide an answer for his teacher in a matter of a few moments. You see, this child did not see the problem in the same way as all the other students. Having developed a love of numbers at such an early age, the child saw that there was a different way to arrive at a solution.
Instead of adding all the numbers, he could put the numbers into pairs. That way, he would only have to add fifty numbers. In fact, if he took the first number (1) and added it to the last number (100), the result would be 101, which would be true for 2 and 99, 3 and 98, and so on until you got to 50 and 51. So, you have 50 pairs of numbers that add up to 101. Adding those numbers would be quite easy, and so would multiplying them, which he did, and he confidently told the teacher the correct answer: 5,050.
Now, I don’t want anyone to feel bad that a six year old boy was able to do this so quickly. The boy, supposedly, was Carl Gauss. Which would mean we would have to play “Are You Smarter Than a Mathematical Child Prodigy”, which would not make for very good television. What I do want to point out is that there are times when you need to take a step back and try to think of things differently in order to arrive at possible solutions. No, it is not always easy to do so as we are all very well trained by now. Our neural patterns are quite set, unless you want to discuss the quantum mechanics involved. But when the time comes and you are presented with a problem that seems daunting it will often benefit you to make an effort to look for new ways of thinking.
I see examples of this from time to time, both inside and outside of my office. For example, how about putting people into orbit or on the moon? There was a lot of creative thinking in order to get the job done there. But what about the time you were tuning some T-SQL and after tearing it down for the tenth time that day you decided to try something a little different, and that new line of thinking is what led you to a better solution? As much as I hate the term “outside the box”, I would argue that there is something to be said for those of us that have the ability to approach problems from different angles. Some call that “experience”, but I recognize it for what it is: “problem solver”.
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