Moving into the unknown.

We live in a chaotic world. No matter how ordered it may seem, its almost always guaranteed the perfect plan will not work out. Its comes as no surprise, considering the entropy of the universe has been increasing ever since the BigBang. This only means one thing, we are constantly moving into the unknown and sometimes it can be scary. 

If you know Stephen Hawking, you've probably ever wondered how manages to do it all inspite of his limitations.  How he can speak without a voice, write without using his hands and write the most intelligent things in a wheelchair. Part of the answer of the answer to this question is Intel and the other half is failures ,mistakes and lessons learned through trial and error. Intel had to fail about 5 times before inventing ACAT(Assistive Contextually Aware Toolkit), a user interface that was appropriate for Hawking. It took 3 years and 5 failed attempts to come to this conclusion and to many people this may appear to be wasted time.

Problem solving has obviously many processes but the most important and unfortunately the most time consuming is that of recognising what the problem is. It took centuries for us to realise that we are not at the centre of the universe, it took Thomas Edison 1000 failures to invent the light bulb, it took  J.K Rowling 12 rejections to find the right publisher, the list goes on. Ray Kurweil speaks of the exponential growth of the universe which is just a similar idea of slow to no development at early stages and sporadic growth thereafter.  Its important to realise this because we live for problems, we are paid to solve problems, we feel validated by solving problems and when it all feels like a dead end , its good to know that it is not wasted time. All we can do is face the unknown with hope that at the end of the tunnel there will be light.

In this chaotic world, we are all working towards that 'AHA' moment , that moment when we have it all figured out. When we have realised the root cause of the problem and solved it. But we should keep in mind it takes time, otherwise it wouldn't be worth it. The next time you are moving into the unknown , remember this and move forward in faith that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Afterall ..

“Every problem is a gift- without problems we would not grow.” 

--Anthony Robbins.