Today is probably the 1000th time I'd felt the trouble of an idea or a thought process that came just about 10 seconds late. The post is not about the 1000th time, but about all of them. Ranging from an elegant solution to a problem that you realise just after handing in an exam paper, or a question whose answer becomes obvious to you just after you'd asked it to jokes in the middle of a conversation like this or an interesting thought that could've changed the route of a serious discussion.
Life is queer in the sense that you ought to learn atleast when you're doing something, if not before. The process of learning is skewed - unless you are given the ability to predict all possible situations which you will get into. But if you could actually predict that, well, you can do a lot better than just not making a mistake. And since there are infinite possible situations that you could get into, its not possible to predict and be prepared for all of them. So, in life, you're theoretically bound to make mistakes. This is not even getting into misjudgements and miscalculations.
So the most important thing is to learn from all of these and extrapolate these to many more so that the probability of doing a mistake decays over time. Maybe this is what they call as experience. Now, the best part of this experience is that it doesn't have to be yours - you could learn from others' mistakes as well, which is one of those nice things that give you a hand in avoiding errors. Fortunately/Unfortunately, as your experience gets aggregated, you stop making many trivial errors, which is good, but if you make an error is has huge effects. And as the story goes, unless you take time to sharpen your axe you aren't going to get better just by cutting more trees. The "silly" errors that don't affect anything drastically are the ones to remind you that your axe has to be sharpened.
I'm happy about most of those 1000 mistakes, I know I'm a much better person now because of them. The next time you make a mistake instead of feeling dejected, think about it - you'll be glad about it (in a weird sense) sometime soon. This, in my opinion is real experience.
Life is queer in the sense that you ought to learn atleast when you're doing something, if not before. The process of learning is skewed - unless you are given the ability to predict all possible situations which you will get into. But if you could actually predict that, well, you can do a lot better than just not making a mistake. And since there are infinite possible situations that you could get into, its not possible to predict and be prepared for all of them. So, in life, you're theoretically bound to make mistakes. This is not even getting into misjudgements and miscalculations.
So the most important thing is to learn from all of these and extrapolate these to many more so that the probability of doing a mistake decays over time. Maybe this is what they call as experience. Now, the best part of this experience is that it doesn't have to be yours - you could learn from others' mistakes as well, which is one of those nice things that give you a hand in avoiding errors. Fortunately/Unfortunately, as your experience gets aggregated, you stop making many trivial errors, which is good, but if you make an error is has huge effects. And as the story goes, unless you take time to sharpen your axe you aren't going to get better just by cutting more trees. The "silly" errors that don't affect anything drastically are the ones to remind you that your axe has to be sharpened.
I'm happy about most of those 1000 mistakes, I know I'm a much better person now because of them. The next time you make a mistake instead of feeling dejected, think about it - you'll be glad about it (in a weird sense) sometime soon. This, in my opinion is real experience.
4 comments:
Ramblings resulting from a midnight effort at productivity?
@ what you said, I've never experienced the weird happiness feeling myself, but if you have, I think you are on the right path to doing things right :-)
It is an old post da, I'd posted it in the evening after a series of mistakes that day :P
And, I usually end up regretting the mistakes, but well, there are some occasions where I've felt better about them later :-)
Edit to the prev comment, especially that day I realised how those mistakes would've grown into something I probably couldn't fix on.
I know exactly what you mean.
Your statement of "real experience" reminds me of this rant on experimental physics: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html (well, I don't think the guy had the patience to get through physics)
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