A skill to master critical thinking | Syed Samir Anis | TEDxMuscatSalon

cuz what's with the ball oh right it for that I was supposed to read this before coming read it right now okay I guess I'll read it although so place yourself in front of the ball straighten your non-dominant leg contract the hamstrings of your dominant leg make a 45-degree angle about your knee contract your quadriceps to extend your leg and make contact with the ball what did I just read it's better to show you that's it I just read the instructions on how to kick a ball now these students are very clear it's literally giving

you the muscle physiology of how to make contact with the ball and then watch the flight is that necessary no I mean you know how to kick a ball you've been kicking a ball to see where you were a child right it's one of the first things we actually learn how to do now imagine a hypothetical situation where there's an individual who's never interacted with the ball you grew up in a village somewhere never knew what a ball is never saw it and you place the ball in front of but for some reason remember this

hypothetical they have perfect proficiency in English and when they read the instructions you think they'll be able to kick the ball probably not they're gonna try they're gonna fail and remember that word fail then ever try again fail again try again fail again until eventually they get it now was that because of the instructions it was because they kept on trying and they kept on failing right now was it necessary for the instructions like I asked before no so I don't need these instructions I know how to kick a ball I reassured you will do

it again right now try that again [Music] wait this balls a little deflated okay I thought both balls would be the same that's what I asked for but this one is deflated that doesn't help me at all the instructions had absolutely no advice on how to deal with a deflated ball they told me how to deal with the optimal situation which is a perfectly inflated ball also assuming I have perfectly functioning legs now now I failed at kicking this ball as well as the first one because again hypothetically I've never dealt with a deflated ball

before and the instructions didn't advise me on how to deal with it but I try it again I know this time that the ball is deflated I need more power but from my previous experience I'm going to sacrifice accuracy because of that power so I'm gonna increase my accuracy by taking my shoe off applying more power I'm kicking it perfectly now of course this is a very basic example I know how to kick a ball so don't judge my motor skills please and the second ball was supposed to be deflated so don't judge the ohms

the organization team because this is supposed to happen no my point being I had to fail because if I hadn't failed I wouldn't have learned it for some reason in our society not just our society everywhere you go to west or the east failure is such a stigma nobody wants their child to fail the math test even though it's just a six-year-old child and what's worse is you compete with everyone else how come you got a 97 when your cousin got a 99 on the exact same example what's worse is how come you got a

60 when your cousin got a 98 in the exact same exam why are you punishing the child for failing he's a child he's supposed to fail at this point you're supposed to tell him try to figure out what you did wrong so then next time you have the same problem you don't do it again you learn from your mistakes you learn how to solve the problem you learn how to think and thinking critical situations and that's the whole point top right now hydro problem solve and think critically so why do you think you're bad at

thinking critically because you haven't done it myself included and I came up with this realization fairly young I was very lucky when I was about 14 years old I was a overweight short grade 9 kid who really wanted to play basketball really wanted to play basket because all of his friends played basketball they were all good it's just the sidelines because bubble with them I also had ads whoa didn't help so what I did was I downloaded and printed instructions on how to shoot a basketball that was my only chance I couldn't run and keep

up with him I had to shoot so I download these instructions which was the inspiration of the football example here and I started reading these instructions at the school gymnasium after classes and while I was reading I was so intent on memorizing every single step and I believe that memorizing these instructions would lead me to shoot a basketball properly because that's what I do in classes I study then I'm gonna write the exams the exams are the exact questions that I study and is perfectly fine no problem so let's try that here while I was

doing that my physic teacher snuck up behind me and I don't know if you guys are aware of the stereotypes in teachers in the West they're very harsh and especially the guys they believe in tough love so when I was reading this he saw me and literally just started laughing at me he was actually mocking me you think it doesn't matter if you memorize every single word in this document if you remember every single word on how to shoot a ball and every book written and every single word on the internet on how to shoot

a basketball you'll never be able to shoot a basketball until you actually shoot a basketball so he made me shoot the basketball 50 times that day and I'm serious I'm not making this up I missed every single shot because I just didn't have the strength by the time I got to the 20 shot my arms felt like jelly but he made me finish anyway he made me do that several times that week I must have missed almost a thousand shots I'm not exaggerating 50 shots a date for a few weeks I'm gonna miss most of

those shots but eventually I got my first shot now why did I get that first shot and a lot of people think it's because you experienced you tried so many times eventually you figured out how to do it it wasn't so much that I figured out what to do it was more of a process of elimination I kept on failing and every time I missed a shot I realized what I did wrong and I justified sometimes I had too much power sometimes I sacrificed accuracy sometimes actual sacrifice power for accuracy wise vice-versa a lot of

factors and it took me hundreds of shots to figure out the optimal ratio to get the ball into the net right so that's my point here you have to fail you should fail failing is good isn't it better that you fail when you're young and you're not liable and you won't be held accountable then when you fail when you are older and you are liable and it'll held accountable fail now learn from your mistakes so you don't fail later now pretty much explain to you guys why you guys suck including myself at problem-solving critical thinking

what's the solution there are many solutions and there are many different pathways everyone can take the whole point is you have to try you have to put yourself into situations where you have to solve problems because the issue is ever since you started school you've been sheltered you've been given ideal situations you go and your memorize your perfect inflated ball scenario go to your exam hall answer the perfect scenario with your perfect answer and then you go home and then when you get to real life you're deflated ball comes and you don't know what to

do so experience your deflated ball before you get to real life before you graduate and the best way to do that the first step what I did which may some of you may have already done it to observe people who have already failed countless times the experience people they're all around you most of them sitting in the front first few ropes you know that the thing about experienced individuals is that they want they always want to share their experience so leech off of that experience see what they do differently see observe when they are they

approach a problem the way they approach a problem how they come up with a solution and how they succeed at solving that problem there right there you won't be able to emulate it perfectly because you're just starting out but now you'll have a basis so once you have that basis you can move forward and it does it doesn't have to be within your college it can be anywhere now if you're a medical student go to the clinics more go to the hospital more interact with patients more learn from the patient learn their side of the

perspective look at the doctors at how they are treating the patients how they're taking history how they're approaching the problem look at your seniors even look at the students that are younger than you you always learn from other people observe how they're solving problems try it if it works for you great if it doesn't try something else try to come up with something yourself now let's say it's too hard you're not able to make it to the hospital so much you're not able to observe people that solve problems on a daily basis you still have

people in your family that do that every day you have your parents specifically your mother you'd be amazed at how many times your mother solves serious issues every day like it's nothing it's mind-boggling because I remember when I was about I was very young about 9 or 10 years old and I was making a project from my school and I was there was a lot of electrical work along and I had one of the extension wires that you see over here an outlet my little brother somehow he was riding his bike the wire was very

thin in a cut in half and I had no time I had to go to school right away so what do I do as most kids do they run to their mother say what am I supposed to do I'm gonna fail this is not gonna work so she goes into the air to blow my father's toolbox takes out these pliers rips the wire apart takes the copper wiring tape him together with electrical I was like this there this will work and I'm like great she's all another problem or I went to school did the project

I did fairly well and came back and then a few years later after that I came up with a similar situation I'm like oh I know what to do now I did the same thing it worked relatively well not as well as when she did it but it did and that's when I realized how does she know how to do that she's not an electrical engineer right she studied journalism how does she know how to do this it's because she's experienced these situations so many times in her life not just for herself but for her

entire family for years that's something like this just didn't even faze her so why not leach off of that experience it's right there give yourself the headstart the second thing you could do which I mentioned before to be better at problem solving and critical thinking is to place yourself in situations where you will have problems daunting unimaginable problems something that you really expect to fail in because like I said failing is good don't be afraid to fail embrace it so the ideal situation is one long task that takes a what to perform you have your

final goal and you're starting off with nothing and you know there will be a lot of different problems in between I'll give you an example of that of what we did last year yes so you can see in this picture over here we built a maze it's a human-sized maze right you can actually go into the maze and you come out in one of the four entrances anywhere else.this okay it's amazing but do you realize how amazing this is for a few here for students to pull off on their own they have limited resources limited

finances they have no experience in construction whatsoever and they have very little time this was during human function all right but they still succeeded and being part of that team I can tell you we had no idea what we're doing we had no idea how we were gonna succeed we thought we were gonna fail but that didn't stop us few creative individuals and our team just came up with a concept of using a human-sized maze we just wanted to do that we don't know how it was relevant to the event we didn't know what the

point of it was we don't know what we were gonna do with it we didn't know how to make it and we didn't even know what materials we needed we didn't even know where we were gonna make it it was really convenient we had a wide open courtyard last year so we had about five or six problems in front of us but we took them at a time what's the first step find out what we're gonna do with the maze so we sat down and we came up with a game how do we use it

maze okay we came up with really awesome scenarios of something like the zombie apocalypse it was a really fun day I don't have time to go into detail about the game itself but you can talk to me afterwards I can tell you so once we came up with a solution of what to do with the maze how do we build the maze then we were going so we were trying to come up with solutions how to build a maze one of the members in our team said that she knows an architect her sister actually so

she sat down with her and gave her the guidelines of what we needed and they designed the maze together then we had an outline of the maze the next step build the maze so while we had members trying to get permission to actually use this area we just started working anyway because if we didn't get the permission whatever we'll just start somewhere else again from the beginning why waste time so we started making based on the measurements we started making out the layouts this is us working in night at night so you can see us

measuring out the layout of the maze and keep in mind at this time we still have no idea how we're gonna build the maze but we solved our first problem which was what we're gonna do with the maze now you see the chalk over there that we're using the maze was huge it ran out with about a quarter over well the only 1/4 of the maze was mapped out three-quarters of the mazes left what are we gonna do quickly we're thinking okay someone go buy spray paint we'll just use them right hopefully um Simo but

it's sad we'll just move it over and hide it later so another solution we have um our outline perfectly well done still don't know how to build a maze all right then we come back the next day all happy that we did so much work and we see it in the sunlight from the top the measurements are completely off can I tell you we have no experience we didn't know how to measure these properly this time we use measuring tape and we did it properly this time and we got more chalk more space spray paint

so we already then the next day when we saw it in the morning hoping it worked better this time it worked very well and what we were doing that we still needed a way to build a may so we're trying many different things while we were still measuring we were looking for solutions for problems we knew we were gonna face later on while we were working on a current problem as well so we tried many things we try to actually dig and put wooden pillars in didn't work I tried metal beams didn't work eventually and

this is a golden rule for problem solving look at your surroundings what resources do you have available to you we said OMC is under heavy construction right now they're really rushing to get a lot of work done we need help with construction why don't we ask for advice from construction workers we went to them we told them we need this this and this how do you suggest we go along with it they gave us a lot of steps and scenarios and we were able to move along and get these pillars up once these pillars were

up we realized that yeah these are this is hollow there's nothing here people just go right through well you know what just cover it with cloth we'll have to do with manual boiler just cover it with cloth we covered it with cloth and then when there with the final product that I showed you before and the game went phenomenal and I can go into more detail with inmates because the problems didn't end until the last possible minute actually until the game ended even after when we didn't know how to dispose of it but the problems

kept on coming and we kept on solving the problems as they came that's the point there's always a solution if you didn't find the solutions because you didn't find the solution but that doesn't matter if we had fit that this oh whatever it looks bad but we would have learned a lot which we did anyway and use it the next time I'm telling you all the people that work in this project most of them are involved in TEDx and TEDx was easy compared to that because we went through this already we came straight to FedEx

it wouldn't be as this successful right so the final message is take-home messages bail fail now so you don't fail later okay face the variable if love life of the deflated ball right now so when you see it the next time you can kick the deflated ball right in the face