Keep looking after you find "The right answer"

In A Whack On the Side Of The Head author Roger von Oech wrote:

"By the time the average person finishes college he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The 'right answer' approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn't that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers - all depending on what you are looking for. But when we think that there is only one right answer, we'll stop looking as soon as we find one."

I work as a software engineer. It is important when creating software to consider several designs. Often the second or third design I come up with is much better than the first idea. I also find that by considering several designs I will avoid problems that I wouldn't have thought about. It is much harder to fix a problem if I am in the middle of writing the code.

As parents we can teach our children to look for several right answers. If our children learn at a young age to come up with several solutions, they will do much better in life. They won't stop with the first career they happen upon. They will be more effective at work. They will be more flexible in their relationships.

One way we can teach our children the habit of looking for more than one right answer is to say things like: "Yes, that is a good solution, can you think of other options?" You can use this approach in talking about why certain events happened in history. You can have your children brainstorm about ways to do their chores.

As homeschoolers Janine and I try to help our daughters realize there can be many answers to complex problems. We try to navigate them through the process of finding several possible solutions and then selecting one of them.

Roger von Oech is right. Our lives will be richer if we can keep looking pass the first "right answer" we find.


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