Try not to be too complicated

Ok, i skipped a few days of posting on this blog (and broke my commitment), so i think I’ll write in english as a compensation.

So, today I was sitting around in the east wing of ITB’s campus center when our STEI brethren (so we call them), the informatics engineering students came to the east wing to hold a meeting about SPARTA (it’s the name of their initiation process, not the 300 movie). So, I sat there and listened to their discussion for a while. The head of class of 2007, Dhika, read out the items that need to be brought tomorrow.

Most of the items are clear enough. However, the last two are given in riddles. The first of the “riddled items” is chicken, rice, and banana leaf. It actually refers to lemper, an indonesian food made of chicken meat inside rice that is wrapped by a banana leaf. Easy enough. Next is an “edible metal”. Some of them suggested that it might actually refers to salt, while Nicky (an electrical engineering student, not one of ‘em) suggested that it might be silver queen (note the silver).

Well, actually, the meeting could have ended there, with everyone agreeing that they should bring lemper and silver queen (or salt, if you prefer eating salt to silver queen). But someone actually worried too much and suggested that they should really bring chicken, rice, and banana leaf. Because of this, the debate dragged on for quite a while. I eventually decided to leave and eat some food.

I think that to think in detail is a good thing, but being too detailed is not always a good thing. The problem is actually quite simple, and if all of the IF students bring the same item, the SPARTA officials will usually not make a fuss about it. The same goes for everyday life. The answer to everyday problems might actually lie in the simplest of things.

As an example, America spent about 2 million dollars in researching a writing instrument that works in space, and come out with a special pen, while Russia simply used pencil and skipped all the research and extra spending.

So, in answering everyday problem, you really need not to think in a complicated way. Simply open your mind, and the answer might actually be simple.