There are so many times, I wanted to do something and then end up not doing it. Or even worse, messed up completely, going lost without any trace of what I was doing.
Let me tell you a story. I went to visit one of my known person in a different city. A few other countrymen also joined. We had talks, lots of food, laughter. It was an interesting get together. At the end, we were watching football match. The host brought a watermelon. I was so delighted to see watermelon, though in my deep stomach, I was full. I saw that the host was afraid to take the knife to cut it. I realized that the fear is not on cutting the watermelon, but it’s on the knife. So I went to the kitchen side to help a bit. I took the knife, cut the watermelon into half, and then into several small pieces, like in this picture –
You know, I like the watermelon to eat this way. Biting on crunchy melons is a heavenly thing. Well, I eat it like this, because the place I spent my childhood, we used to eat it this way. But here goes the problem. I saw later, that the host was trying hard to bite on the pieces, and kind of mixing the juices with dress. So I asked what had happened and the host replied it’s inconvenient. Then I took the knife again and cut the remaining slices into pieces in a way that the host was surprised. There was an awe from her – “It’s that easy!”. Well, I’m not a magician. The simple thing I did, was something like below –
The only reason of myself being an expert(!) in kitchen stuffs was that she didn’t watch this way before, and I had read an article about it around an year ago. I knew there was an way to cut it in better shape with ease. Though I couldn’t apply it in first hand, but when I saw her problem, the solution instantly hit my head. It might be possible that she already knew, but was surprised to give me a good feeling. In either case, get to know the solution beforehand is interesting.
As an engineer, I have to solve a lot of problems in daily basis. I work as a Software Developer. I see many people around me solving puzzles. They are mostly technical, work related. At the same time, these engineers solve their day to day life issues. But the main problem I see while doing these stuffs is to hit the problem on the right way.
The best way to solve any problem till so far is the “Scientific Method”. You might have already heard about it. Those who didn’t, it sounds like an obvious one, right? The method that scientists follow :p That’s correct. And those who are already familiar with it, you know it’s a simple one. It’s the process of trial and error. You have a list of hypothesis. You take one, try to prove or disprove it, then if it fails, try the next hypothesis. It’s that simple. It has been the most established way. People who are good at solving problems, are actually very fast in this process. They have had done so many trials that they can tell you the solution to many problems without even trying. Because they know it already.
The hardest part here is to come up with hypothesis. Once you have a hypothesis, though I know its not very easy to test a hypothesis, but sometimes coming up with a hypothesis may seem to be much harder than trying it once you have the hypothesis. I think there are two parts that helps engineers to come up with hypothesis, specially when the problem is really of new type.
First step, the engineer need to have a believe that there is a solution to this problem. He needs to convince himself that it’s possible to solve this puzzle. I call it the Trust part. And then next step, the engineer needs to persuade his mind, that the solution, which is there somewhere hidden, can be found by him. This thing ,I call the Confidence part. Together of these two, the Trusted Confidence helps engineers to get to an hypothesis, that they can try and proceed. And as the hypothesis comes before trying any method, I call this Trusted Confidence, as the preface of any Scientific Method. Unless any engineer fails to do so, will end up wasting time in loops.
The application of these terms are not limited to engineers only. Any people who are using Scientific Methods to feed their need, can also be benefitted by both the Trust and Confidence part. Focusing on these two, helps people to reveal the niddle like hypothesis from haywire. Because finding things in haywire isn’t that easy. Finding objects in dark, when you can not see things, when your sensors are not giving you signals, it’s very hard to move to the target. All you need is the trust that yeah, it’s somewhere there. You keep searching, and eventually you will find it.
Though there is one challenge I find for this Trusted Confidence. It is possible that you kept searching throughout the whole day and at the end of the day you realized that it’s wrong dark room that you were in. It partially conflicts with the first part of Trusted Confidence, but I think there must be a way to avoid this case. It’s like the common problem of how often you should look back. I hope to give some thought on this, later. Any comments on this is also appreciated.