Cover art. (2000). Source: www.intropsych.com
The authors determine to teach the reader 12 practices “for bringing possibility to life.” (Zander & Zander, 2002). Chapter 1 illustrates for us the way our mind frames in our circumstances in a way that may not necessarily represent the entire truth or the whole picture. Our brains become wired to think in certain ways, and those habits may not lead us to the solutions we need when confronted with obstacles. To prove this phenomenon to their readers, the authors challenge them to complete the nine-dot puzzle.
07ninedot. (n.d.) Source: www.intropsych.com
The challenge is to “join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper.” (Zander & Zander, 2002)
If you cannot complete the task, which my wife and I both failed to do, it is because your brain has inserted extra instructions into those expressly written above. I’ll allow you to figure out exactly what that is, but the point is our minds are very adept at misconstruing bits of information together to from an impression that is not completely true. When faced with seemingly unsolvable problems, our challenge is to figure out what barriers our mind is inventing and seek to see around it. As my 9th grade Algebra teacher said on a daily basis, “every problem has a solution”.
Sources:
Zander, R. & Zander, B. (2002). The art of possibility: Transforming professional and personal life. New York: Penguin Books.
Filed under: Books, Week 3 Tagged: | nine dot puzzle, Zander
Don’t beat yourself up about the inability to do the connect-the-dots exercise, it’s a clear example of taking advantage of how we are conditioned to “stay within the lines” because that is an integral part of our early training in being in our society. So often what we think of as “genius” is not the ability to hold a lot of data in active memory, but to make a jump in the process and look at things from an unexpected point of view and see have a new view of things as if one was going from 2D to 3D.