Impossible Job vs. Easy Parts

"How do you eat an elephant?" some people ask. "One bite at a time" is the answer. Also I read long ago that Eskimos were good at repair since they tend to view things not as just a whole, but the sum of their parts. There is some wisdom in each of these. At times, a problem may seem impossible. However, if we look at it as a sum of its parts, it may become far easier to solve. Some examples.

Tripling Manufacturing

Once as head of Manufacturing for a corporation I had a large operation. My boss one day walked in and asked me for a plan to triple the size of Manufacturing, and he wanted it tomorrow. I thought when I heard this request it was impossible. It was too complex. I must have looked like I was catatonic with fear for a minute, since my boss repeated, "I want it tomorrow!" Then the boss closed the door in my office leaving me shocked.

But then after a bit, I thought about an easy approach. What if I broke this huge breathing monster of a factory down to its four parts? I might consider it a sum of (1) people, (2) floor space, (3) machines, and (4) parts for the product. And so now an impossible job actually became almost too easy. For step one, I just multiplied up each of those four items by a factor of three. Then I already had "an" answer. But I decided to look further and ask myself if I could find any savings by the larger volume in any of those four categories. I took those savings into account. Now instead of an impossible problem, I had an answer. And I was done very much ahead of time. When I gave the answer to my boss later, he seemed very surprised, but he did like the answer.

Video Game (2 dimensional)

Then for home amusement on another day, I wanted to try my hand writing a video game, a simple two dimensional one that was common in the early days of video games. Again, on the surface, it seemed impossible. But what if I broke down the tasks of a two dimensional video game? It had a few distinct different items it needed. It needed (1) An image for the background, (2) moveable smaller images that could move on that screen, that some people back then called "sprites," (3) Sound Effects, and (4) Software to get it all to work together. A person might ask, "What about music?" Well, logically music is just the needed sound effect at the correct frequencies where those sound effects play one after each other. Music is just a series of sound effects, to a computer. But either way, I now had the impossible job gone and instead 4 tasks that I could achieve. I did several video games on the Commodore 64 computer and one later on a PC. All one had to learn to do, was those four tasks.

A comment? I believe our brain power is far more capable than most of us believe. We should trust our brain power and look for "what we do know." further example of this is below.

Circumference of the Earth

Once while waiting for a person bowling, I decided to see if I could closely approximate the circumference of the earth. And I was going to do so without cheating, knowing the diameter or radius, or looking it up on the internet by phone or other, or looking in a book. If one believes in their brain power, their question should begin with, "What do we know about this subject?" How would you approach it?

I decided that time zones might be a method. The US seems to have 4 time zones and the US is about 3000 miles wide, or so. That would mean that the time zones were just a bit under 1000 miles apart from each other. But the US is not in the center of the earth, the equator. So what if we mentally pulled down the US time zones to the equator? They might now be close to 1000 miles between them. Well, there are 24 time zones in an earth day, and so there would be 24 time zones around the earth. 24 times 1000 would make 24,000 the approximate circumference of the earth. I understand that the earth circumference is actually 24,901. I found that close. After all, I did not expect more than an approximation.

Summary

I hope that some of this helps to convince you that our brains are quite capable of figuring out many things - if we allow ourselves to use that great power.

Ron Plachno
March 13, 2025
 

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