Insights

Originally posted 2004-11-30 13:27:29

I can’t convert hours to days, or vice versa. I never have been able to. Sure, I’ve memorized that 24 hours make one day, and that 48 hours make two days. Beyond that, however, I’m lost, and when someone says, \”You’ve got 96 hours to deliver that document,\” I’m left fumbling, trying to divide 24 into 96 in my head while cursing the Sumerians.

The other day, however, I overheard my 9-year-old son and his cousin discussing hours-to-days conversions, and my son said, \”Think of them like quarters, minus one.\”

(For the uninitiated, \”quarters\” in the US are 25 cent coins, four of which make a dollar)

I was stunned. I quickly realized the power in this insight. 96 hours? Easy–that’s 100 hours minus 4 hours, and 100 divided by 25 is 4. 96 hours equals 4 days. Going the other direction is just as trivial. 8 days? 8 quarters equals 2 dollars, so 200 hours minus 8 hours equals 192 hours. Suddenly, this problem that was for me intractable became simple. I feel empowered!

How’d I miss such an easy trick? Once realized, this shortcut for converting hours to days and vice versa seems so apparent that everyone should be able to come up with it. Not once, however, did it occur to me in my 35 years. I had to learn it from my 9-year-old son.

It seems to me that most people are, like me, plodders: people who follow others’ footsteps. By plodders, I don’t mean morons. Being a plodder says nothing about your ability to learn, understand, incorporate, or implement knowledge. Some plodders are stupid, some are very bright, and most have average intelligence. Plodders, however, don’t contribute new knowledge. They don’t have insights. They can’t create new ways to attack the world’s problems. The people who have insights–the non-plodders–are those that advance the world. They see things that plodders don’t. They put synthesize things that would never occur to plodders. I wish I could stand in their ranks, but sadly, I plod.

I’m reminded of the legend concerning Karl Friedrich Gauss, the mathematician who purportedly bested everyone in school at the age of 5 by summing the numbers 1 – 100 the fastest. He had an insight–saw a pattern–and paired the numbers into couplets, each of which summed 101 (1 and 100, 2 and 99, . . . 50 and 51). He thus created 50 such couplets to span the 1 – 100 spectrum, and multipled 50 by 101 to get the correct answer: 5050. I’d likely still be summing.