Don’t Brush It Off as “Just a Kid”!

Last week, when I heard that my daughter, who is only four and a half years old, had a chess lesson at school that day, I asked her: “Tell me, sweetheart, what pieces are there in chess?” To be honest, I was expecting an answer such as pawn, knight, king and so on, but my daughter turned to me and, quite calmly and confidently, said: “Of course, there are black pieces and there are white pieces, Dad.” Her answer brought a smile to my face and a great sense of wonder to my mind. And at that moment I saw once again how we, as adults, miss the fundamental truths and look at things in such a complicated way.

Just as this matters in everyday life, it is also one of the important points to keep in mind within the discipline of engineering. Most of the time, when we face a problem, we come up with many complicated paths to a solution, and instead of leading us to a result, this can drag us into an even more hopeless situation. In contrast, we can say that approaching the solution within the framework of basic logic, looking at the world almost through the eyes of a child, is one of the most effective ways of reaching a result. Indeed, from the past to the present, very simple propositions lie at the heart of many inventions. Of course, however simple the starting point may be, the result that emerges as you progress can naturally become complex. Yet being able to explain it and convey it to different audiences is extremely important. At this point, two mutually supporting quotes by Albert Einstein have often been a source of inspiration for me. The first of these is: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” The simplicity meant in this statement is not poor quality or a lack of substance. This is exactly where Albert Einstein’s second quote, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”, clearly explains the measure of simplicity.

To come back to my daughter’s basic description of the pieces in a game of chess: yes, although there are pieces such as the knight, the pawn and the king in chess, at the most fundamental level we need to describe these pieces in two different colour groups. In other words, rather than by the names given to them according to their properties, the pieces actually need to be classified categorically. Many of us see this as an unnecessary detail, drop it from our focus and move on to the next step of defining things. And we don’t do this only for chess; when we look back, we can see that we often do the same in our daily lives and in our professional work. As we get older, or the busier we become with things, this pattern of behaviour takes hold of us even more clearly. And afterwards, we find ourselves very far from the very approach that we ignored and regarded as an unnecessary detail. Let us illustrate it like this: many parents help their children with their homework, and the effort they put into solving the word problems in the maths lessons of primary school children in particular is often admirable. The thing is, many of us can easily solve the problem and reach the right answer, yet many of us also struggle to explain the solution to our child in a way they can understand. And yet we too once sat at the very same desks as they do now before getting to where we are today. Faced with this situation, we openly admit, both to ourselves and to those around us, that we can solve the problem but cannot pass it on to our child in a way they can understand. I think one of the best things we can do to avoid ending up in this situation is to step away a little from the rush of daily life, spend more time with children, and be able to look at life again as purely and simply as we did in our childhood.

In conclusion, we must not forget that we were all children once; what we need to do now is never to give up being a child completely.