Have you seen the Bol­ly­wood film 3 Idiots? It’s the highest-grossing Bol­ly­wood film of all time in India about the adven­tures of three col­lege engi­neer­ing stu­dents. One of the scenes left an impres­sion in me.

* Let me clar­ify that I am aware this space pen story is an urban myth. I am only using it as a sto­ry­telling device and for some humor (at least for me and the audi­ence in the the­atre who laughed at the scene). It made me think about how we over­think which led to this post. Whether it is true or not is besides the point.

As chil­dren we once were, grow­ing up was a process of becom­ing adults. Not only bio­log­i­cally but also men­tally. We learned to be respon­si­ble, to pay the bills, to get things done and we learned the com­plex world of adult­hood. To become adults we had to lose our tantrums, silli­ness, our child­hood. And we lost our minds. Our child-like minds.

The mind of a child is the great­est gift we will ever receive. As embryos in our moth­ers’ womb, our heart, the first organ to develop only to power the next organ – the devel­op­ing brain which is soon mak­ing a quar­ter of a mil­lion new neu­rons every minute. In the first 10 years of life, our infant brain will have made bil­lions and bil­lions of con­nec­tions. It is an super­charged engine for learn­ing and cre­ativ­ity. Yet by adult­hood we have lost most of this cre­ativ­ity. We now think like adults. That is we think too much and our thoughts are too influ­enced by our knowl­edge. We need to get back our abil­ity to think like kids again. How?

Con­sider this ques­tion. I found this spread­ing on Face­book the other day and it took me a few min­utes to solve. Go on. Try.

If you want to know the answer. It’s at the end of the arti­cle. So just keep reading.

Where online would you find a lot of smart and knowl­edge­able peo­ple? Quora of course. I really like to visit Quora and learn from sub­ject mat­ter experts show­ing off their wits and exper­tise. Though some­times they over­think and com­pli­cate prob­lems with com­pli­cated answers. Many times peo­ple are just try­ing to show off how clever they are with rocket sci­ence. Like this ques­tion on Quora.

The most pop­u­lar answer for the ques­tion before I answered involved cal­cu­la­tions with com­passes, con­cen­tric cir­cles, Pythagorean the­o­rem and square roots. I have no idea what a con­cen­tric cir­cle is, let alone cooks in a pizza kitchen. And who keeps com­passes in a kitchen? But since it’s the most pop­u­lar answer I sup­pose over­think­ing is pop­u­lar in Quora.

I imag­ined myself with no math­e­mat­i­cal knowl­edge, a cook good with my hands, in a hot and humid kitchen faced with this prob­lem. What would I do? Turns out that the bet­ter solu­tion is much sim­pler and would only required a piece of string and a pen at the very least. Shouldn’t be too hard to find in a kitchen. And so I offered my answer.

All you have to do is cir­cle a string around the pizza to cut a length equal to the pizza cir­cum­fer­ence. Then fash­ion a divider of some sort or even use your thumb and index fin­ger. Adjust your thumb and fin­ger and wrap the string eleven times equally around them. This effec­tively divides the string into eleven equal parts. Use a pen and mark the string. Cir­cle the string around the pizza again and cut using the mark­ings as guides. My answer received more than a hun­dred votes, went on to become the most voted and the ques­tion was made a Best Source.

Con­jur­ing com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions may make you look smart but to become truly cre­ative you need to be able to lib­er­ate your mind from the the shell of knowl­edge, edu­ca­tion and adul­ti­fi­ca­tion you have accu­mu­lated. Only then can you think like a child again.

Answer to the num­bers question

The ques­tion has noth­ing to do with math­e­mat­ics. Look for the closed loops or shapes in each num­ber and count them. In 0, 6, 8 and 9. 8 has two of them. 2581 has two. The answer is 2.

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