I’m a lot of things, but a mathematician is not one of them.
Growing up I hated math.
More to the point, I still hate it.
If I understood math my life would be very different.
My accountant would appreciate me.
I’d have a banker that knew my name.
But… I probably wouldn’t be in the industry I’m in either, and that’s just has hard to imagine.
In school the last place I wanted to find myself was in a position where math homework stared back at me…just as disappointed in me as I was at it.
I didn’t, and still don’t, understand it.
It was never something I thought I’d need to know either.
How many apples are left after two trains travel specific distances moving at a fixed pace wasn’t something I could see myself needing to answer…even under interrogation.
Here’s the thing…it was never about the math.
You’re probably not going to need to sit in a dark room at some point in your life and calculate the trajectory and pace of an uncreative story problem.
What you will need to do, is problem solve.
That’s the trick to the work.
It’s about seeing the problem through.
And now that we live in a world where we seem hell bent on setting our course to auto-pilot, we could all use some more problem solving skills to hone our humanity on.
When did being good at something become a bad thing…
For generations in our country we have succumbed to the idea that monotonous work was the safest play.
And from a corporate perspective, we have prescribed to the idea that the lowest common denominator of worker…one that wouldn’t ask questions, wouldn’t rock the boat, and would simply tow the line…was the best way to raise our bottom line.
Well, the bottom line was boosted.
The workforce was placated.
The middle class was gutted.
And we sold out our future for a ripe tomato today.
We celebrated mediocrity, and then we complained that people weren’t doing their jobs.
The next man up became a meat grinder, and the hunger was insatiable.
We fed a gluttonous beast and now kneel at their alter.
Our word problem has become a very real tangible problem.
Corporations are buying out inventive ideas from smaller entities…not to implement them into their systems, but to kill the idea.
We’ve been so hard up for a win that we’ve started a competition with basic human decency.
To make it worse…it hasn’t been fighting back.
There is a train traveling at maximum speed in our direction.
We aren’t on it.
A glimmer of light is growing on the horizon, but it is not called hope.
Solve for Y.