Wednesday, April 10, 2013

An answer vs The Right Answer

I was in my thirties before I recognized that sometimes you just need to find an answer and sometimes there is value is looking for several answers and then picking the better answer.

I like this thought from Dan Galvin's Thought For The Day mailing list:

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.

-Roger von Oech,
"A Whack On the Side Of The Head"

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