Boggle

As of late, mostly due to sheer boredom, I am sad to say that I have become a part of the hoard of iPhone users whom have and play a game on their phone.

Yes, I am ashamed to admit such weakness but life must continue on...

What game do I have? Candy Crush? Angry Birds? No. Boggle.

Yes, you heard me correctly: boggle.

Before I continue on, I need to state (though it should be obvious) that I am not endorsing any of the games mentioned in this blog post nor am I receiving any compensation for mentioning these games. I am using them merely for illustrative purposes and any other meaning derived from the namesake and/or mention is just completely off base of what I intend to achieve in this post.

At any rate, why boggle? Why any game? Why even bring it up?

To answer the first question, I needed something a little less serious on my phone, apart from the GIS apps that I use for work and a little more serious than my Top Gear app that I have. I needed a game that would be entertaining and something that would possibly help me feel as though I am expanding my brain power/knowledge. The conclusion that I have reached is twofold: 1. my vocabulary stinks and 2. Man hours have been squandered until it feels like my brainpower has diminished, or at the very least stayed the same.

I have also come to the conclusions that I will be asking for a thesaurus for Christmas (wait, is there an app for that??) and that the only way to truly master this game is to be a genius at anagrams. To the latter point, if that is the case then I might as well stop playing it.

Regardless, the word searching game brings up some good philosophical points. Perhaps the most intriguing point to be made is the continual need to be mentally flexible or, as many human resources employees and hiring managers like to continually remind me is that in finding a solution to a problem, one must be creative. Typically they are saying this in the context of rejecting my employment application - but that's beside the point.

In order to be creative with boggle, one must be able to look in all directions forwards, backwards, sideways, upside down to be able to recognize a string of letters that make up a word. Sometimes they encompass all directions. One of my goals of the game (outside of breaking my streak of finding 71/183 possible words in three minutes) is to come up with a word, recognized by the Oxford Dictionary using all of the puzzle pieces. That would require real creativity. And real knowledge of the words in the Oxford Dictionary, of which I do not have the time (nor when it comes to it, the drive) to do so. However, regardless of your intelligence level, we all eventually find ourselves ramming into a mental wall that we just cannot seem to get around. This is where having a varied background comes into play.

By having several very different experiences so far in my life, what I am able to do is look at a problem from multiple perspectives hence, possibly being able to step back from this wall and try and find the edges so that you can easily walk around it. Humans though, are creatures of habit and eventually, we do find ourselves staring at the same wall. Whether the wall stood up and moved back in front of us (figuratively speaking here) or, we did an about face and walked directly into it from the other side (speaking both literally and figuratively here. I might as well add "story of my life" to this parenthetical).

Interestingly enough, the solutions to the two problems are the same, yet complete opposites: in the first case, you need to step back and look around and in the second case; you merely have to just turn around. Yet both are perhaps the most difficult things for us as humans to do. Why? Could it be because we are creatures of habit? Perhaps. Could it be because we don't know any better? Possibly. But, it may also be because humans, to some degree, like the comfort of predictability. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it may to some degree limit your scope of ‘getting past that brick wall?'

That's not to diminish people who have had the same career for a long time (and by that I mean at least five or more years). If you enjoy what you are doing, go for it but what I have found is that you can only relate to people only as far as you have ventured on your own. Some professions offer the variety to get out of your comfort zone and you build up your experiences vicariously after 20 years or so but the advantage to having a varied background comes down to using your skills and gaining new ones in vastly different settings. Example: I have used statistical analysis in research, health care and athletics - all of them deal with interpreting numbers to come to a conclusion and predict an outcome - very intensely, might I add. What a constant job has a major advantage over is that you do become an expert and specialized in a particular field, which would be nice, I am not going to lie. But my problem is that I have so many interests, so many varied activities that I enjoy and want to become an 'expert' in, that I am almost fearful of being specialized in one particular area because I do not want to limit myself. If a college or university representative is reading this and knows of a program that would give me a master's in life, and then hire me as a campus guru, contact me!

Not that I would change any of my past experiences - which I would never do - but it does create quite a conundrum.