Children are pretty much useless, not only are their tiny child hands incapable of real work, they’re also pretty stupid. We remember keeping a child entertained for hours by telling them Corn Flakes were an elaborate chicken themed jigsaw puzzle, in short they’re idiots. However, in certain tests they can consistently beat adults.
Why? Well to put it bluntly, kids don’t mess around when given a group building exercise. For example, when tasked with the relatively simple task of constructing the highest possible tower out of spaghetti, tape and a single marshmallow, kids virtually always beat adults. This is because while groups of adults slowly discuss which method they think will work best, kids tape their thumbs to their hands and pretend to be dinosaurs while sticking spaghetti to everything.
This means by the time adults realise their tower is less structurally sound than the fragile relationships they’ve just strained by arguing about something children do for fun, there’s no time to correct it. Children on the other hand will have usually tried many more methods by this point and figured out how to best their oppressive adult overlords. The children also have another ace up their sleeve, they use the marshmallow first.
You see, the marshmallow is a red herring in this famous group building exercise and many people fail to realise that the taller the tower becomes, the more the marshmallows weight comes into play. As children tend to instinctively jam as much spaghetti into the marshmallow as possible to start with, their towers end up more structurally sound than adult made ones.
We’re not saying kids should be designing skyscrapers, but sometimes, the simplest solution is usually the best, or at least the one that will let you make Ken from accounting look like an idiot.
