Choices in life! You are sorted if you know what you don’t want!

The moment we are assigned the task of selecting something, we become instantly, by our own choice(pun intended!) victims of our perception of the other person’s high expectation of our ability to select and this burdens and negatively corrodes our ability to select what is right and most appropriate for the situation at hand!

Instead, it is the easiest and in many ways liberating to identify what we don’t like out of the given set of items or possibilities! Yes, try it out yourself and it goes without mentioning here that what remains after elimination, auto selects itself!

I don’t know how many of you from the generation Z have come across multiple choice questions,… but our generation, just 1.5 generations before you, have faced multiple choice questions in competitive exams, board exams etc! One phenomenon regarding multiple choice questions is, if you go and look for the right answer, it takes time, instead it is easier to eliminate the wrong answers and end up with the right one!

Now let’s expand our horizons… in life, aesthetics, design,art almost in every walk of life, it is very simple to realise intuitively what isn’t right for you! And the more you practice elimination( not attaching importance to) the more you elevate your chances of finding the right solution!

I have to quote a real life example here, I was faced with a multiple choice examination as the final competitive exam for my selection into design education. Three hours was the allotted time! For two hours out of these I struggled with finding the right answer out of the four multiple choice options against each of these close to 200 questions( little foggy about this number!) When there was only 45 minutes of the allotted time was remaining, I was struck by lightening( virtual) inside my head, and I did feel as if something had transformed when I solved my first question using this elimination method! It was as if I had been auto reset to think in this new way and realise to my utter bewilderment that it was almost intuitive solution to finding the right answers! As they say.. rest is history and the man solved almost all the questions in the little window of time that was remaining and walked out feeling like the ruler of planet earth, over STD (Subscribers Trunk Dial I suppose, these were the public call booths available before the mobile age!) I called home and proclaimed to the parents that their son had cracked the exam and let the celebrations begin! and order the red carpet….

Try it to realise it! Let me add further, in my afterlife(after above described triumph) as a design professional, I have applied this trick close to 0.9million times, when faced with a question of selecting what is the right design/ aesthetic or any other type of a solution, you know by now what this ruler of earth(just kidding, no ego) would have tried!

An afterthought… Don’t you think ‘Problem Solving’ should be hailed as the superpower of this new superhero that we can come up with…. ‘The Problem Solver!’ I see content for a new article here…..!!