Interesting fad in the office right now... Puzzles. =P
I've always liked puzzles. I guess I inherited it from my dad. He used to buy Dell puzzle magazines all the time and solve various puzzles. Sometimes I'd steal into one of them and solve the easy ones. In time I managed to do some of the more difficult ones... now I'm the one who buys them when I suddenly have the urge. =P
Of course my favorite puzzle of all time, and I guess one of my "secret" talents is the Rubix cube. From grade school to college I've practiced, memorized and improved various patterns that I've encountered. Though I don't get to practice much lately, I believe I can still get good times when I solve it. There are times when I try to remember what moves I did when I encountered, and I can't manage to remember them if I'm not holding a cube, but when I see it I just suddenly know what to do.
An officemate of mine commented when she found out that I solve the cube, and she said that it's easy because patterns are available. You just follow them and you're done. I do not deny, I am guilty of that fact. Out of all the sequences I do, only one or two are original, and I can say that they are even just derived from other sequences I have encountered.
Then I thought... Aren't all puzzles like that? There are various patterns... In Sudoku it's crossing out numbers... in Kakuro it's looking for what I call "hot numbers" or those that only have one combination of numbers. Math problems, may they be word problems or whatever, usually have that technique to solve them, which may be considered a pattern. In some cases, it's a very crucial key, where a very difficult problem suddenly becomes so easy after finding it. I guess this is what makes solving the cube special... Anyone can learn the pattern, but how fast you can see it, how fast you implement it, knowing the right pattern to do, how decided you are in doing it... That's what makes one an expert on it.
And then, I realized... One's whole life can actually be seen as a puzzle. Problems encountered everyday can be compared to various patterns, may it be personal experience, or stories by other people. As with the rubix cube, some patterns may become instinctive due to good habits (or bad vices? lol). When you think about the situation, you may not know or forget what to do when you encounter it, but when it comes face to face with you, you know what to do. Anyone can live life to the fullest as long as they have learned the "patterns" of life. It's up to us on how fast we can react, knowing what to do with them, and deciding to do them, when those patterns come.
LOL... I guess I just think about it too much... Which leads to another discussion, our team building in Nasgbu just this previous Saturday. I'll post pics when I get them... haha
There was a part there where you find out what your dominant work trait was. I forget the terms they used... all I remember was that one trait is the aggressive just do work attitude, another is the get many friends attitude, another is the OC/try to be constant about things attitude, while the last is the perfectionist/analyzing attitude. My dominant attitude was of course the last one. (Which is prolly the reason why I'm making a post analyzing all these XDDD).
Then I start to wonder... I know that one's personality is a mix of those different attitudes, only some may be stronger than the others. The handler explained this at the start. The exercise determines which are the stronger ones, but I realized, it does not determine how strong they really were. It was all comparison with the other traits, but how truly dominant one was or how OC one was... It was not determined. I thought about it because I knew I was a mix of all the traits, but how strong was I on those that were weak compared to my perfectionist/analytical side?
Anyways I guess I better stop now before I start to think about things too much ^_^ Whatever they mean... I hope I just made sense =P Life truly is a puzzle... haha
