Magic Carpet

[andrewducker]

When I was a child, in the heady days of 1864, I had a teacher with a magic carpet.

This particular magic carpet couldn't fly, or summon djinni, or protect you from burning desert sands. However, it could cause people to magically attain the answers to the questions they sought.

The teacher had carefully placed this carpet next to her desk, and when we wanted to ask ehr a question about some questions we were working on, we would go and stand on this carpet until she had finished what she was working (which was, frequently, helping the person before us in the queue).

People standing on this carpet would often be hit by a sudden look of realisation and scurry off of the carpet, back to their desks, to feverishly scribble down the epiphany they had just had. It truly was an amazing carpet.

I just worked out why it works so well - it's not just that the answer comes to you if you wait long enough - I was walking across to ask Sheila, my project analyst, what part of the spec meant when I realised what the answer was. And I realised that I'd worked out the answer because, while walking across, I'd started phrasing the question I was going to ask in my mind. There mere act of phrasing the question in a form that another person could understand made the answer obvious.

Which, of course, is the reason that talking to other people is good for you.

Comments

[darkoshi]

yeah. sometimes when i start getting stressed and something goes wrong or i don't understand something, instead of taking a moment to think it over, i get the impulse to ask someone else. i've learned that if i resist that impulse (or when the impulse is thwarted by the other person not answering the phone or being at their desk) and take the moment to calm my brain down and simply think... that the answer / solution becomes obvious.

or sometimes i'll start typing a long and complicated email trying to describe a problem, and then realize that it will be much easier to fix it myself than make someone else understand what's wrong, even if it is technically their area of responsibility.