Ask Uncle Bill: Thinking Outside The Box

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Workers are encouraged to think outside the box and then punished when they do so. Outside the box thinking is, I guess, the Eureka type of discovery when the light bulb goes off after being struck by lightning and you think up the next great Super Bowl commercial. That doesn't happen very often, if ever. Our educational institutions and commercial institutions should teach people how to logically gather information, process it and make decisions. But we are not taught how to do that so we race around trying to look busy and productive and feeling desperate.

This bit of heavy thinking came as I drove through College Station, home of Texas A&M University, a few weeks ago. College campuses always remind me of Doug because Doug did a thinking exercise many years ago that still astounds me for its simplicity and beauty.

College admission procedures back then were not a lot different then now except if you were male and didn't go to college you went to Vietnam so there was a big incentive to get into school. Plus there weren't junior colleges to fall back on for two more years of extended high school. You had to get in somewhere and private schools were, as they are now, prohibitively expensive and the use of loans was not acceptable. Our parents were Great Depression and World War II veterans and borrowing money was just something they didn't do. You saved for your kids education and you expected them to go to public universities. The best deal for us was the University of Illinois and everybody knew it. My father was the Henry Ford of education. Henry Ford said you could have any color car you wanted as long as it was black. My dad said you could go anywhere you wanted as long as it was Illinois.

So with the draft board breathing down our necks we started the process. And as in any group, the herd seperates. Joe and Frank and one Steve didn't have the grades or the SAT scores and knew they were headed to Southern Illinois University for drug dealer training. The other Steve, Lee and I had the grades. Steve and I barely and Lee no problem as he was a mechanical genius but things didn't work out later for him in life and I learned last year he committed suicide. I got relatively decent grades through osmosis as I have two older sisters that got really great grades. One had a 3.9 GPA in high school and she was the dolt. The other one had a straight 4.0 in high school and then did a repeat in college. I gave up early trying to match her since the best I could do was tie.

The guy on the bubble was Doug. Bright guy, decent SAT scores but a bit of an ambition problem early in his high school career. Nice guy too with an uncanny resemblance to Paul McCartney. But Doug didn't have the grades. Applied to Illinois and got the academic equivalent of Drop Dead. But he did have a girlfriend in town that he wanted to keep (we were townies), a strained relationship with his father and wanted to pay most of his own way in school out of pride, and smart enough to realize that a degree from Illinois was worth a lot more than a degree from Southern, Eastern, or Western Illinois university.

Fall turned into winter and the group was starting to worry about Doug. Joe and Frank and Steve were set and Steve 2, Lee and I got our acceptances and immediately stopped doing any work. Doug wasn't doing much or so we thought and so we worried. Winter faded into spring and no action until April when Doug announced at lunch that he had been accepted. Where? Illinois. Huh?

Here's how he did it and how great thinking is really just collecting and figuring out the variables. Doug listed--

girlfriend

strained relationship with father

monetary constraints

added worth of graduating from a Big Ten school like Illinois

and the mention of Big Ten triggered football and basketball in Doug's mind.

Football? Basketball? What? By gathering all the variables in one place the solution to Doug's dilemma presented itself. Doug realized that Illinois had a bad, but sizeable, athletic program and not all athletes were Rhodes Scholar material. Where did they put the jocks at Illinois? In the Physical Education department, of course, so Doug went down to the PE department, mumbled something about wanting to be a coach and got accepted. Doug went from being the dumbest Liberal Arts applicant to being the smartest PE applicant.

After a year in PE Doug had the grades to transfer to Liberal Arts. The last thing I heard he was an artist in New York.

Maybe you don't think what Doug did was all that great but I do because when somebody figures out something I can't figure out, I'm impressed. And the answer was there all the time--figure out where the jocks go and you're in. Doug took some time to gather the facts, push them around a little and the solution presented itself. Most of us are too busy running around trying to be brilliant to just be smart. Doug was smart.

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