Adam Grant has written a book called Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World in which he argues that we have long valued the rule-following, memorizing students. He notes that the students in the US often regarded as “prodigies”—the ones who “learn to read at age two, play Bach at four, breeze through calculus at six”—rarely go on to change the world. When scholars study the most influential people in history, they are rarely those regarded as “gifted” or “geniuses” in their childhood. Instead, the people who excel in school often “apply their extraordinary abilities in ordinary ways, mastering their jobs without questioning defaults, and without making waves.” Grant concludes: “Although we rely on them to keep the world running smoothly, they keep us running on a treadmill.” Those who do go on to change the world are creative and flexible thinkers, people who think outside rather than inside the box.
Many people know that creative and flexible thinking is valuable, but they do not associate it with mathematics. Instead, they see math time as an area in which to follow rules and be compliant. But when we combine mathematics with creativity, openness, and out-of-the-box thinking, it is wonderfully liberating. This is something everybody deserves to know about and experience, and when they do, they do not look back.
The advantages of deep and flexible thinking apply to all subjects and avenues of life. We do not know what problems people will need to solve in the future, but they are likely to be problems we have never even dreamed of. Filling our minds with content that we can reproduce at speed is unlikely to help us solve the problems of the future; instead, training our minds to think deeply, creatively, and flexibly seems far more useful. The thinking of “trailblazers” whose brains were studied was found to be more flexible than that of regular people. They had learned to approach problems in different ways and not just rely on a memory. Speed and fixed approaches will only take us so far. In the education world and beyond, we must all challenge the assumptions about the benefits of speed and memorization and instead focus on flexible and creative learning. This will help us unlock our own and others’ potential as learners.
