Overthinking And Your Child-Like Mind
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 engineering students. One of the scenes left an impression on me.
As the 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 a 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?
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.
