Changing the world is easy. Take Steve Jobs for example. The poster-entrepreneur of our era who reinvented the world! He did it, while taking credit for every idea from his VP of Industrial Design Johnatan Ive, bashing the competition and being a control freak. Nobody’s perfect.

(Image source: Fotolia)

So how did such a guy actually manage to reinvent anything? That’s because the challenge is easier than it first seems.

Here is the 3-step process:

• Choose a rising industry
• Find a decent idea
• Transform that idea into a genius one

Jobs just chose the right industry (IT), had a decent idea for a new phone (most people knew it was coming) and reinvented it as he went along, incorporating different technologies to create the iPhone. The genius is the last part. And it all comes after you start.

Let’s dig deeper into this.

Recommended Reading: 40 People Who Changed The Internet

Choose a rising industry

What you need to do is look around and harvest ideas from people – ideas for a rising industry to get into. See what people are interested in and envision their needs for the future. "Steal" every idea you can.

(Image source: Fotolia)

For instance, we all know that green energy or sustainable harmless nuclear energy is the future. But what are you going to do about it? The industry only needs great implementation. And you need to look no further than your smartphone’s clock widget to understand that “mobile” is the new revolution, inching its way into manifestation each day.

Ideas Are Everywhere

Industry ideas are all around you. It’s also easy to find something good nowadays, because everything is shared. A quick search and you’ll see the Top 10 fastest growing industries. The list may contain less glamour and hype than expected. But maybe, just maybe, there’s more to "nut and bolt manufacturing" than meets the eye?

Find A Decent Idea and Stick to it

Once you’ve chosen a decent industry, stick with it. Stop looking. Don’t switch industries too soon. There’s room for world-changing events in any industry. Sure, a new, revolutionary type of bolt won’t get that much press. But you still can change the world, while making a lot of money. This isn’t a method for glory. We are interested in actually reinventing the world. And to do that, you need a "brilliant idea".

Brilliant ideas already exist in everybody’s mind, in their primal state. There are basically no genius ideas in existence just different re-interpretations / combinations of normal, primal ones which everybody has. Genius ideas are created only after you start implementing normal ones.

Bring A New Idea To An Existing Industry

For example, the pinch-and-zoom gesture from an iPhone was actually a much older idea. In 1983 a guy called Myron Krueger invented it. Jobs just gave it a different application, and a much larger marketing platform. The Nintendo Wii seems groundbreaking! That’s until you realize that motion sensor for alarms existed for years. They just integrated it in a new industry.

So don’t spend too much time looking for a great idea.

Just Do It. Better.

Once you have an idea you feel is decent enough, it’s hammer time. You should incorporate new concepts into your product, much like how Steve Jobs did with the iPhone pinch-and-zoom gesture. This is the core of your business. This is where you actually reinvent the world.

You take a known idea and view it differently, adding things to it which other people haven’t thought of adding.

Synergy helps. Lateral thinking helps. Having a team with different skills is great. Just try to reinterpret other products and technologies, and integrate them into your product. Not knowing much about your industry helps. Often times experts find it hard to view stuff other than in the way they were taught. If you’re an absolute novice in your field, it’s easier to reinvent and innovate.

A few more things to remember:

1. Innovation is meant for dummies. Don’t get so caught up in innovations for your product that you forsake usability. If you want to move around, you don’t use a camel-bicycle hybrid do you? Your innovations should be easy to use and easy to understand.

2. Keep the Product simple. Likewise, you don’t want your product to be overcomplicated. You’ll end up a mad genius, with no real impact on the world.

3. Keep the Name simple. I get it. You like your product to be multi-featured. You want to squeeze as much information and value into your product’s name as possible. Add an X or Z to make it sound cooler. But it’s the iPhone 5 for a reason. It’s not the iPhone 5000Y UltraTouchSensitive + French Fries, is it?

4. They like it Dummy-proof and super-easy to use. Nobody likes a stupid product. A stupid product isn’t dummy-proof.

5. Reinterpretation is not stealing. Use retweaked bit of designs from various sources. Straight up innovation is only reserved to the elite or the absolute novice. If you’re anywhere in between, keep on “stealing”.

Conclusion

So again, the 3 steps to reinvent the world are as follows:

• Take the beaten path (rising industry)
• Make sure you choose a decent car (idea)
• Transform that car into a super-car (reinvent) and make sure it still has 4 wheels

There are no genius ideas, only genius reinterpretations. Don’t spend time looking for a genius idea, get down-n-dirty with a decent one in a rising industry (pretty easy to find) and make sure you spend all your effort towards trying to innovate inside the limits of that particular idea.

Then, change the world.

Ever heard of horror stories where the candidate is asked a totally unrelated question out of the blue at the interview table? "Why is a manhole cover round?" "Which part of the sandwich is the most important?" "Name three things you would like to have with you if you were stranded on a deserted island."

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We doubt any job is going to leave you stranded on a deserted island anytime soon but yes, Mr. Interviewer, why do you torture candidates with questions like these? The truth is, they are asked for a variety of reasons, but it’s not because they want the answer.

In fact, some of these questions don’t have a correct answer. What the recruiters are interested in is what your answers can tell them about you.

Recommended Reading: How To Ace Your Interviews (From The Interviewer’s POV)

Types Of Oddball Questions

But first, let’s take a look at how odd (aka nerve-wracking) these questions can be. Glassdoor is the best place to take a look at the weirdest interview questions ever put forth by corporations, questions like:

1. "How many cows are there in Canada?" – Google
2. "How many quarters would you need to reach the height of the Empire State building?" – Jet Blue
3. "How would people communicate in a perfect world?" – Novell
4. "Estimate how many windows are in New York." – Bain & Company
5. "Calculate the angle of two clock pointers when time is 11:50" – Bank of America

(Source: Glassdoor, 2012)

Looks like we’re screwed, aren’t we?

What’s the point?

Believe it or not, the answer is not the most important thing. What interviewers are looking for (if they know what they are doing – more on that later) revolves around three things:

1. to see your confidence level and how you react to something unexpected
2. to see if you can think out of the box, put more than just your degree on the table
3. to see if you can solve new, upcoming problems which may not have a textbook answer.

Be Ready for anything

Note that these are the questions that are asked by people bent on catching you off guard, so it’s highly unlikely that you would be able to get the question ‘right’. However, you’d still have to think of something that beats "I don’t know, what’s the answer?".

If your response runs along the lines of asking someone else what the answer is, or a mere I don’t know (or I don’t really care), good luck getting a phone call back.

Quick!
How many penguins would it take to surround the North Pole? And give 2 standard deviations from your answer (Goldman Sachs).

Your Grasp of concepts

If you are the trying sort, remember that for some of these questions, your approach to the question is more important than the answer itself. While in school or university, we’re taught to give the right answer, it is the concepts that are in the limelight when it comes to solving real-life problems.

Think Out Of The Box

How do you put an elephant in a fridge in three steps. Take a minute to think about it if this is new to you. Done? Just open the door to the fridge, put the elephant in then close the door. It’s a perfectly legitimate answer to a perfectly legitimate question, and it satisfies the three-step requirement too!

The only dead weight holding back this answer was probably the common knowledge that an elephant is usually a lot bigger than even your largest fridge. Toss that out and the answer is so elegantly simple, Einstein would have been proud.

Here’s a variation of that question involving a nickel-sized you and a blender, and what one author thinks is a possible answer.

Hints and Tips

These questions burn up the Internet because of their ambiguous nature. And by the time you get to the interview table, chances are the interviewers have changed the questions. So basically you can’t prepare for these questions, or can you?

Here are three things that may help.

1. The questions relate to the job role you are applying for, or what the company does, so try to keep that at the back of your head at all times.
2. Secondly, the recruiters are probably using this question to settle a tie. Leave an impression.
3. Lastly, don’t take it too seriously, because sometimes even the interviewers have no idea what they are doing.

For More Tips: First Job Interview: 10 Things You Should Know

Clueless Interviewers

Yes, not all interviewers know what they are doing. In smaller companies, instead of an HR executive, well-trained in recruitment techniques, the boss or the managers are doing the interviewing. Some companies use weird questions like these simply because everyone else is using it.

And research is revealing that questions that are ‘designed to scare‘ should be removed from the interview table. A company could lose a real good candidate who has passed everything else with flying colors apart from the one oddball interview question that had no reason to be there in the first place.

Read Also: 10 Common Misconceptions About Job Interviews

The Best tactic

So after all that, what should you do when asked weird questions like these? Have fun with it, but try to make the interviewers remember you. As an example, remember the question about using penguins to measure the North Pole?

If asked that, I’d probably say I wouldn’t know what the answer would be but penguins do not live at the North Pole and more importantly, the North Pole doesn’t really physically exist. There isn’t really a pole there, or an area with a border. It’s just ice, everywhere. Then, I’d pray that they won’t ask me to use unicorns to measure rainbows.

In a previous post, we have discussed that HTML elements are essentially a “box”. Traditionally, when we position those boxes, whether to the right or to the left, we use the float property.

  .main {  	float: left;	  }  .sidebar {  	float: right;  }

There is one certain downside when we apply this technique, the direct parent element of .main and .sidebar will collapse as illustrated below.

Thus, we mostly need to apply CSS clearfix to the parent to counter the effect.

Flexible Box Module

Since this is now becoming a common practice in web design, W3C announced a new module called Flexible Box or simply Flexbox. But, this module is still in the drafts stage and there has been several changes over the years.

At the time of the writing, this module is only fully supported in Chrome 22 (with prefix) and Opera 12.1, according to CanIUse.com. All right, let’s see how this module works.

To demonstrate this new CSS3 feature, we will prepare the HTML structure. We have a div that is containing two other div, like so.

  <div class="cf">  	<div class="col left">  		<p>Pastry icing sweet roll fruitcake croissant. Tart wypas tiramisu marshmallow   		marshmallow sweet roll. Cheesecake bear claw pudding bonbon sweet roll powder carrot cake.   		Cake sweet donut tart.</p>  	</div>  	<div class="col right">  		<p>Dessert gummies sweet roll. Dessert gummi bears soufflé cotton candy icing.  		Lollipop wafer lemon drops toffee chocolate.</p>  	</div>  </div>  

Let’s just assume that the left column is the main content section and the right column is the sidebar. So that, as you can see, we add more (random) content to the left column rather than to the right column.

As we have mentioned above; in a traditional way, we will do something like this in the stylesheet for positioning the column. We float the column, specify the proper width as well as include the CSS clearfix, like so.

  .cf:before,  .cf:after {      content: "";      display: table;  }  .cf:after {      clear: both;  }  .cf {      *zoom: 1;  }  .old .col {  	float: left;  }  .old .left {  	width: 310px;  }  .old .right {  	width: 210px;  }  

As expected, here is how the result looks like.

With Flexbox module it becomes much simpler. Technically, we simply need to set the parent’s display to flex.

  .flex {  	display: -webkit-flex;  	display: flex;  }  

Interestingly, this will also determine the proper width for the div inside without us specifying it explicitly in the stylesheet and this is how it turns out.

Furthermore, we can also set flexbox to the child element. In the following example, we apply it to the left column.

Now, since we have two paragraphes inside it, they will also be divided, as shown below.

The Syntax

There are actually more syntax included in Flexible box module, but as we mentioned earlier in this post, they have been changing over the years. For example, in 2009 the specification said display: box, then in 2011 it changed to display: flexbox. So, I think we better wait until this module is settled, before we implement it wildly on our websites.

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Alright, alright pipe down. So many prophets have been ‘predicting’ the fall of Apple for ages ever since the company lost their beloved CEO. But how possible is the demise of one of the most valuable (in recent times) companies in the world? Perhaps this inforgraphic will reveal clues.

Check out in this infographic by MoneyChoice.org how Apple stocks fared in the past 12 months, its growth (and how it is slowing down) as well as how it fares against the other competitors, including archnemesis, Android. Plus, follow its timeline of Apple products beginning with the first Macintosh computer in 1984 until its coming-soon releases: the Apple TV, Smart Watch and having Siri integrated into vehicles.

Related: Click here for more Infographics.