To explain this rather fancy word, a heuristic is basically a ‘general rule of thumb’, being a shortcut for solving problems via the method of trial and error. On the face of it, heuristics are quite ugly and inefficient in solving problems. Thus, a heuristic is very much the antithesis of a mathematical proof – which often is elegant and even beautiful.
Being in an age of much technological innovation, we are inundated by information. Every day YouTube uploads 576,000 hours worth of content every single day. Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data every single day. In the United States alone, there were 304,912 books published in the single year of 2013. Assuming one reads 30 books a year, it would take about 10,164 years to get through all these books. If we live till 80 and we read at a rate of 30 books a year from the age of 15, that would require 156 lifetimes to consume a single year of all North American Content! In this, we have to be selective of who and what we read – to find the quality amidst the quantity.
I had forgotten how much I enjoyed biographies. Biographies allows us to have an in depth conversation with anyone in the world across time, where we can have a peek in the pivotal moments of their lives. In some respects, a biography is better than a real life conversation because these lives have been painstakingly condensed and carefully synthesised via many drafts for our benefit. Through biographies, we can extract as much as we can of these people in the shortest span of time – all in a small and neat package of a book.
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