Jack Ma: Story of Alibaba E-Commerce and Online Retail by GineersNow GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 013, Jac | Page 33

Bring Out The Engineering Genius In You
With These Simple Exercises
Geniuses aren’t always one in a million.
by Cielo Santos
People often believe that geniuses are a rare breed
and that they are born, not made. They appear so
rarely that you can make a safe guess that only
one or two appear in a million people. But did you
know that there are actually exercises which help
you build up the genius in you? THINK FROM ALL THE ANGLES
There isn’t only one way to get to an answer.
People created knives to slice and cut, but never
for the purpose of spreading butter on bread.
Always think of all the angles to help yourself
formulate a solution.
Roberta B. Ness, MD, MPH, dean at the School
of Public Health, and vice president of innovation
at the University of Texas Health Science Center
at Houston, talked about her findings in her book,
Genius Unmasked. Ness talked about systematic
tools that Marie Curie and even Einstein used to
make their scientific discoveries. THINK OUT OF THE BOX
Engineers have this talent naturally, so it’s good to
hone it more. As the saying goes, to get something
you never had, you have to do something you’ve
never done. So, sometimes thinking crazy gets
results, after all, most inventions in our world today
came from crazy ideas.
To start of, geniuses always ask the right
questions. They base off their hypothesis on past
theories while observing their environment. For
example, American engineer Paul Baran related a
“web of computers” to “neurological pathways”.
They also try to work on different points of view,
as per Ness, stating that Darwin once imagined
himself as a plant while Einstein was visualizing
traveling at the speed of light. Take Niel Bohr’s response of the nuclear physics
community to Wolfgang Pauli’s 1958 presentation:
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The
question that divides us is whether it is crazy
enough to have a chance of being correct.”
If you’re looking for exercises to help you think like
a genius, here’s a few things you can do to think
like one:
CONTOUR DRAWING
Think of doing still life drawing without looking
at your own paper. It’s going to help you be more
observant of what you’re doing and forces you to
be careful before each stroke.
CREATE “OUT OF THIS WORLD” IDEAS
Geniuses suggest that creating ideas off of a
problem and making each more absurd than the
other enable people to think outside the box. Think
of a problem, create ideas for a crazy solution,
then make crazier ideas. Then think of what makes
that idea work and use it to formulate a more
practical solution.
According to Ness, Goodman and Dickerson in
Creativity in the Sciences, they suggest these:
#1 Create a list of crazy ideas about a problem,
then making the next idea more absurd than the
one before.
#2 Choose one of these crazy ideas.
#3 Then take the basic premise of the idea – what
makes this idea stand out
#4 Next, list down the component parts or features
of that particular idea.
#5 Then take one of the component parts of that
idea and use it to create a practical idea.”
Geniuses make use of different cognitive tools to
make their incredible discoveries. Thankfully, we
can harness these tools for our own creations as
well.
E-Commerce, Online Distribution and Management • March 2017
33