A few days ago, I bought a brand new cell phone. The latest Nokia E75. I had fallen in love with the gizmo’s large keyboard and had decided to acquire one for myself. Even though the phone was rich in features, the basic functionalities were very simple and easy to operate. I inserted my sim card, powered it on and started using it.

A couple of days down the line, I received a call from the Nokia folks stating that they would want to come and demonstrate the features of this new phone to me. Wasn’t I wowed? I had owned a number of phones in the past and never had someone called me to volunteer a demonstration. I immediately consented to meet the guy and he came over the same day in the evening.

He configured my email on my mobile, which seemed relatively easy when he did it, but was a big challenge when I had tried doing it myself. When he was done, he asked me, “An interesting feature that Nokia has provided is that of active notes. Have you seen it?”

“What’s that?” I asked. He began playing around with my phone — opened a new note on my screen and typed something immaterial and showed it to me. “The benefit here is that you can link this note to any phone number so that whenever that person calls, this note will pull up on the screen.”

“That’s nice. I saw an instant benefit in the feature. I could load pending items due from my direct reports on active notes and link them to their respective numbers. Will help me jog my memory whenever any of them calls, so that I can then chase them on their deliverables.”

At that very moment, I got a call from home. My home number started flashing and I picked it up. Lo and presto, up on the screen came a note, which said, “This is Anusha, your daughter. This is my first note on your mobile phone” and I was amazed. My daughter was only nine years old. She was playing with my mobile the previous evening and I had chided her for unnecessarily fiddling around with it.

What impressed me the most was the fact that she had generally familiarised herself with something so easily, especially when I needed a Nokia representative to come in and demonstrate it to me. My being impressed had nothing to do with the fact that Anusha was my daughter. When I look around, all the kids of today are far more familiar with technology and gadgets than any of the elders. They are far more comfortable with new technology and anything that to us seems a lot more complex. Something that impressed me to the core, was seen as elementary by my daughter. On the other side, I see my mother struggling even more than I do with something as fundamental as a DVD player.

Why does this happen? Is there a lesson in this for all of us?

How often, in life, do we view problems with a coloured mind and end up not seeing the final goal? How often do we view issues by linking them strongly with the past? How often do we end up comparing things with what we had and hence define benchmark expectations, and anything more than that surprises us?

Children are different. They do not come with any baggage. They are willing to experiment and learn. They do not have at the back of their mind a biased opinion on various issues. They are more adept at embracing change. When my daughter was playing around with the mobile, she was just exploring the phone and discovering new things, when she stumbled on the “active notes” feature. When I started using it, I had a base expectation in mind and did not look beyond that. It was a simple to operate feature with enormous use, if only I had shed the baggage of my prior held mobile, would I have looked at this E75 differently and figured out ways in which I could make it useful for me.

The fact that children are far more technology savvy is only a manifestation that they are far more explorative, inquisitive and do not come with any baggage or mindset from the past. We need to learn from them. If we follow a similar approach in our work and in our day-to-day life, we will often find that solutions to complex problems in our life lie in our own hands, and surprisingly, are very simple to execute. Because of our blind spots and coloured mindsets, we refuse to go out and identify them.

Maybe it’s time to be a child again.