I heard many stories of Chinese folklore while growing up, probably not the weirdest backstory coming from an Asian-American heritage. These stories often come with a variety of morals: the impatient farmer who pulled on his plants to “make them grow faster,” or the lazy worker who would always wait for a rabbit (aka meal) to come right to him, rather than working diligently to feed himself. Obviously, we have a variety of morals regarding diligence and patience there. Of all these stories, one of my favorite is 司马光砸缸, or “Sima Guang smashes a pot,” if you trust my loose Chinese.

Sima Guang is a famous Chinese scholar. If you are particularly interested, you can read more about him here. This particular stories, details an event that occurred early in his childhood. One day, Sima Guang along with a group of children are playing at some arbitrary location (setting, not super important in this story). One particular child decides it would be a smart idea to climb up the village watering pot. Now, this watering pot isn’t the small kind we use to douse a few flowers in our small family garden. It is a massive gourd that holds water for the entire village, more than large enough to fit a small child. Naturally, as all fables with characters and water go, the child has no idea how to swim and begins to drown. The other children start to panic at this point. It turns out, none of them knows how to swim either. In addition, as an amateur swimmer who attempted 2 hours of lifeguard training, I can tell you that trying to save a drowning child without proper training would also not be the best idea. The children try a variety of the obvious strategies: push the pot over, try to climb and pull him out, seek out a rope. But the pot’s too heavy, nobody else can seem to climb or swim, no rope in sight; point is, none of these strategies work. Ultimately, the hero of our story, (Sima Guang) resolved the issue by hurling a rock at the pot, creating a hole, and draining all of the water. Clearly this method was an extremely logical solution. At the same time, it left the opportunity for an incredible creativity.

Certain things naturally seem to become naturally associated with great intelligence: an acceptance letter into an elite university, a solution to a calculus problem, or an 800 SAT score. Yet, each of these feats can each be associated with a backstory: additional tutors, repeated practice over problem sets, etc. As a result, we are left to wonder if these forms of training are truly intelligence or simply a well-trained individual. In many ways, this training seems to also preclude the creativity that ultimately leads to greater creative manipulation.