I've previously written about how pure logic can be stymied by the real world because the real world isn't binary, black and white. There are countless shades of gray, and it's in the "gray" where the magic of imagination pops up.
In a rare bit of self-introspection, I believe DiSC type C personalities like myself don't like to color outside the lines. Because of this, there's difficulty bridging the gap between a known quantity and the next great thing. This is a leap that absolutely demands imaginative ways to push past obvious or existing boundaries, and perhaps my type C cohorts and I are too logical.
If Steve Jobs had been a type C, we might have wound up with incremental improvements on a first-generation Nokia, but we never would have wound up with the iPhone and its many iterations.
A professor once challenged his class to present a logical argument to prove there is life after death. Someone submitted the following.
After death there is mourning.
After morning comes the dawn.
After dawn comes the night.
Beyond the knight is the bishop.
Past the bishop is the Pope.
The Pope has grave convictions.
After a grave conviction, you get life.
Taken as a whole, they're a series of non-sequiturs, but each statement is logically correct on its own. It wouldn't stand up in a religion or philosophy class, but it imaginatively fulfilled the requirements of the assignment.
My high school English teacher, Mr. Ladner, spent a lot of time on classic English literature. One of his exam questions was, "What is a sark?" The answer was a long, flowing shirt worn in Chaucer's England. However, one of his former students didn't know this snippet of information. But it didn't stop him from answering.
"A sark is a fis that eats sips." This was accompanied by a drawing of a "shark" eating a "ship". Appreciating the ability to think outside the box, Mr. Ladner granted full credit.
As a hard-core Type C, I doubt these particular responses to these questions would have occurred to me. They're not obvious or logical.
People who are able to think on this non-conformist plane can annoy me as I picture them to be touchy-feely extroverts. Additionally, they make me envious of their ability to see the unobvious and make leaps of artistry or logic. But they also have my respect. Without them, the world wouldn't have all the glorious nuances between the starkness of black and white.
They've managed to retain some of the childhood spark of imagination we're all born with but most of us have allowed to be educated or conformed out of us.
Images fill my newsfeed with the creativity of friends who refused to surrender this spark. Capturing visions of the mind's eye in a photograph or swath of canvas, the lyrical beauty of the human voice, maybe the more primal media of wood and steel, the ability to create something from nothing is a great gift - for us as well as the wielder.
I'm reminded of a meme that stated "Tetris is a great life lesson. When you fit in, you disappear." Stay illogical, my friends.
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