I am not a mathematically minded person by any stretch of the imagination.
That is such an understatement that I can hardly type I am laughing so hard. What I meant to say is that my whole life I have loathed Maths with the passion of a thousand burning suns… or is it 1001? I’m not certain because there is a number involved.
Once I was introduced to excel in the early nineties, this numbers business picked up considerably. Excel was The Incredible Hulk blasting straight through my titanic Maths-Block. It seems that working out how to get something else to work out Maths seemed infinitely easier than doing the Maths myself. I never looked back, to the extent that for a brief, bizarre moment in my life, I actually worked in Trade Finance in London doing Bulgarian and Nigerian oil deals. Why yes, yes I did.
I think all along I was actually a much more logical thinker than I ever gave myself credit for. You see, I’ve been a slave to ratios my whole life.
Food requires a good ratio of X to Y to taste right. If the ratio of sauce to pasta isn’t exactly right, for example, eating pleasure is considerably diminished. Ratios become critical when you’re dealing with strong flavours like onions, chilli, honey or garlic. Get the balance out of whack and the whole dish needs rescuing.
In art and design, the whole success of a work depends on ratios. The ratio of X colour to Y. Between light and shade. Negative and positive space. And on and on.
I’m rabbiting on about all of this because lately I’ve been investigating why I ever had a Maths-Block in the first place. I think it’s important for me to know because I am in danger of thoughts such as ‘Cappers is a creative person’ and ‘Maybe Maxi-Taxi will be a numbers guy?’. There’s those pesky labels again!
I think I learned at an early age that you were either a Maths person or a Creative person and I wanted to be the latter. Nowadays, I don’t think it has to be an ‘either / or’ thing (more on the ‘Golden Ratio’ in a future post). I think you can be both and I’m doing everything I can to find the parallels between the two. I think if I can find out more about that, I can help my children to learn the ‘other’ way of thinking with a lot more ease than I managed at school.
Are you a ‘Creative’ person or a ‘Maths’ person? Do you think you can be both?
Did you also struggle with a particular subject at school?
[Image via weheartit - please let me know if this image is yours so I can correctly attribute it]