Today's story is from Tim Hurson's book Think Better.
NASA discovered that a pen will not work in outer space. So they gathered teams of mechanical, chemical and hydrodynamic engineers and spent millions of dollars in research. They finally produced a pen that will work in outer space.
About that time the Soviets encountered the same problem. Instead of trying to figure out how a pen will work in zero gravity, they asked, "how can we write in zero gravity?" And then they issued Cosmonauts pencils.
Tim refers to our minds following well-worn patterns as the elephant's tether*. NASA was obviously in a thinking rut. Tim teaches methods to break from ruts and patterns to improve our ability to think and come up with different ideas.
*The elephant's tether - In India, elephant wranglers chained baby elephants to a stake in the ground so that the elephant could not escape. As the elephant grew older they would simply tethered it with a rope. It had been deeply ingrained in the elephant's mind that it could not break free from the tether, so it never tried. That's pretty sick to think that our own thinking could get stuck in ruts like these!
Space Pen from Cairphoto on Flickr
Pencil from Peteryouvelostthenews on Flickr
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