Do You Know the Power of HOW ?

The power of a single word like how can be overwhelming.  I think it could be the most powerful word in the English language or any language for that matter. Why might you ask, think about it.

If you tell yourself you can’t do something your brain stops the process right then and there.  There’s no more thinking, calculating, pondering etc…, If you ask yourself HOW then a whole new world will open up to you.

I am reminded of something that happened to me when I was in high school. I was in a physics class and I often did miserably on all the tests, but I often got A’s or better on all the projects.

See the teacher would give us the projects and I’d ask myself HOW would I accomplish the task at hand. I would then contemplate all the angles and set out on the project. Regardless how impossible the task might seem, I need it could be done merely because he gave us the project.

One particular project we were given was to drop and egg from the ceiling to the floor without it breaking.  The catch on this particular project was that the eggshell itself had to touch both the ceiling and the floor in the process and the eggshell wasn’t allowed to crack. It took me over a week to figure it out.  I didn’t waste time on fretting the difficulty of the experiment.  I simply relaxed and kept asking myself that single important word, HOW.

With less than two hours to the time the project was due and we were to show it off in class I finally got an idea. Like I said I didn’t worry about or waste time on worry, I had asked myself HOW and my conscious knew the time line. When I finally got the answer, and the simplicity of it, I had plenty of time to finish the task. In the end I was one of only two students that passed that particular experiment, everyone else’s eggs broke.

Plenty of people will say something is impossible until something is accomplished. You may wonder how is it possible that people did such wondrous things at times.  I say it is through the power of HOW.  If you keep asking yourself that question eventually your conscious and subconscious minds will help you find a solution.  Often it will be so simple that you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it earlier.

Thomas Edison was known, when confronted by a problem he couldn’t solve right away, to take naps.  He simply asked himself HOW, put the idea aside and fell to sleep.  Many times he would awake with the answer.

By asking yourself HOW it keeps the brain involved on the problem and working on the solution even when you might be working on something else. I’m sure you have felt that sensation where you’re working on something and all of a sudden you get an idea for something else, or solved another problem you’d been working on.  That’s the power of the human brain.

If you tell yourself it’s impossible or that you can’t do something, that’s when the brain shuts off the process to that particular problem and you’ll probably never receive the answer you were looking for. So please remember to ask yourself HOW and let the process work, eventually you will receive an answer. It might not be the answer you wanted, but it will be the HOW to get it done.

Now I bet you’re still wondering how I passed the experiment, so I’ll tell you.  I took a huge piece of cardboard from the art department, folded up the edges of the box equal to that of the egg, kind of like a pizza box. Then I cut a whole in the center just large enough for the eggshell to be flush with the surface side of the box. Afterwords I duct-tapped the egg into place.

The eggshell touched the ceiling through the whole on the surface, I then dropped it. It floated back and forth finally landing on one edge of the box then gently coming down to rest on the floor where the eggshell was able to touch the floor on the bottom. I told you it was simple.

The point of the story is that I didn’t waste time stressing or worrying about the time line or the project, I simply kept asking myself HOW until the answer was revealed.

The only other student to pass was one that went and bought a parrot egg, since the teacher never specified using a chicken egg. He then put it in a mesh sack and tied it to a helium balloon. The weight was a perfect balance allowing the egg to lower softly to the ground.