News
Loose Talk by Les Cowan
12/03/2010 08:34:00
Greeks, geeks and lightbulb moments
"Eureka!" shouted Archimedes, jumping out the bath and running down the street stark naked. Or so the legend goes. Having been troubled for some time with the knotty problem of calculating the volume of irregular objects, the great Greek got out of the tub one day and noticed, as he did so, that the water level had dropped by an amount exactly equal to the volume of himself that had been under it. Had he been a Scot he would probably have shouted "Jings, crivens and help ma bob" but instead, having the good luck to be born in the land of ouzo and kebabs, he let fly with "I've found it!" - or "Eureka!" as they put it then.
And ever since, eureka has been the expletive of choice when something
new and exciting appears - or something old and missing reappears.
Anyway, I've recently had a eureka moment myself. You'd have thought
that after a career in social services then running a business, I'd
have had my personality tested within an inch of its life over the
years. But no. Apart from those who consider your correspondent merely
a 'grumpy old git' or 'as much use as a rusty hacksaw on an airbed',
I've always managed to avoid personality tests.
You know the sort of thing. You look at a child's accident with a paint
pot and tell the bloke in the lab coat why it reminds you of Marilyn
Monroe. Or you fill in the blanks in a 50-page questionnaire to
discover why you hate being late, prefer to keep your pencils nicely
sharpened and can't do algebra. To be specific, I've been doing a
course recently that involved working through the personality test at
www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp After remarkably few
questions, the site purports to come up with your personality type in
terms of how 'Introvert/Extrovert' or 'Thinker/Feeler' you might be
(and a few other things I won't bore you with), finally ending up with
four letters and some percentages that are supposed to sum you up to a tee.
Now, in normal circumstances, I would tend to be pretty skeptical of
that sort of thing - surely the world is a more complicated place and
the 6,692,030,277 (and counting) of us far too rich and various to be
limited to 16 types based on a score for each of 8 values.
But, like I said, it turned out to be a truly eureka moment. For me at
least - and a good few others - it actually seemed to work. So we all
sat around for a bit with our collective gobs hanging open thinking
'Wow - that's why I love this, hate that, find something else boring or
exciting and can't stand my brother/sister/boss or mother-in-law (by
the way, it was somebody else thinking that last one - not me!).
Anyway, what my personality type might actually be is probably only of
interest to me and those who have to put up with it. The point is that
from time to time eureka moments come along. Among all the routine of
work, family and trying to survive economic crises (which, much like
buses, seem to come along at once), there are occasional moments when
the light bulb goes on and things suddenly appear in a different light.
Which is fun. My own eureka moment has actually had quite a surprising
effect. It's helped me see some things in a much more positive light
and made sense of some others that up to now had been quite confusing
and uncomfortable. So eureka moments are great, which, based on a
sample of one, has led me a to few conclusions:
• there is definitely more than one way of making sense of things,
• you're never too old to change your point of view,
• being open minded and curious seems to help,
• sometimes changing your point of view is better, quicker and easier than changing the world round about you.
Then there's also the eureka moment that happens to someone else, which
you'd think we would approve of and encourage. One of my pet hates -
and we're talking pet elephants more than hamsters here - is the phrase
that someone has suddenly 'got religion'.
What gives any of us the right to sum up someone else's eureka moment
as if it were a dose of the flu? Not all eurekas are spiritual of
course, far from it, but some are, and it seems to me that they too
should be treated with respect.
Anyway, you might be thinking: 'Ok fair enough, but what's the point?'
Well here are a few things that are all supposed to have come about in
eureka moments, any one of which I would be quite happy to be
remembered for - Post-It Notes, Velcro, Alternating Current,
Relativity, the Theory of Gravity and Paul McCartney's tune for
Yesterday.
So, if you fancy inventing a revolutionary material, writing a million
seller or just being a bit more comfortable with yourself, turn the
lights down low, put some soft music on, run a bath and let your mind
freewheel. Just keep a bath robe handy in case you need to tell the
world.