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The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas — Linus Pauling
Something that I have noticed while I was in school and in the corporate world was that the people that came up with the right answer, the quickest, were often rewarded. I remember sitting in the class and a student asked “can I go to the bathroom?” The teacher said that this was not the right way to ask the question and decided that this was a learning opportunity for the student, so he said “that’s not the right way to ask to go to the bathroom, what is the right way?” When the student looked confused, he opened it up to the classroom and asked “who can help him out?” My hand immediately shot up and I said “it’s ‘May I go to the bathroom?’”
This memory made it clear to me that school trains us to find the right answer. Find the right answer, and you get a reward (good marks, praise, etc.). Find the right answer quicker, and you get the reward faster.
All too often, when people come to me with problems, my mind works as quickly as it can to come up with a solution. In essence, I have been trained to ‘converge’ quickly on a solution, rather than spending time to ‘diverge’ on different alternatives and options.
For the last few years, recognizing this, I have been training myself to unlearn what school has taught me and…
