When asked the question “What’s bigger than infinity?”, a young child in the popular AT&T commercial quickly replied, “Infinity times infinity.” Yet, despite the courageous attempt to come up with a larger number, infinity times infinity is still, you got it, infinity.

In today’s world, the desire to be ‘bigger and better’ is often shoved down the throats of students, starting at even the prime age of six. Constantly, we are reminded that we have to excel more than our fellow peers from other countries and ultimately we aren’t going to succeed in life if we haven’t changed the world. The pressure to ‘reinvent the wheel,’ is harder than it looks, maybe because all that ‘reinventing’ and ‘changing’ we are suppose to be doing, doesn’t need to be done at all.

“Sometimes we need to strive to change things if we can change them to benefit people in society,” junior Madeline Fines said. “However, we don’t need to reinvent everything because often times our solution has already been created.”

For example, Business Week recently published an article discussing how we need to stop trying to reinvent everything. The article discussed how workers everywhere sit in offices, trying to figure out a solution to a problem that has already been solved by someone else. However, our ignorance and failure to acknowledge that someone else has already solved our problem, leads us into a mind-boggling session of trying to create something that’s right in front of us. If we looked.

“The amount of pressure to create something different and be bigger and better than everyone else is different for each individual,” freshmen Emily Peuser said. “I think that everyone has some sort of pressure of wanting to be bigger and better than everyone else.”

Infinity times infinity may be just infinity for a reason. Because although it sounds like it’s going to be a bigger and better number than just plain, old infinity, it actually fixes it.