Skip to main content

Mistakes - an under-appreciated learning tool

"Failure is the stepping stone to success"
"Success comes through failure"
"Experience comes from bad judgement"

And so on.

We know this to be true, yet why is it that we don't do it well? Children seem to be much better at this than adults.

I think it is because we are so awash in a sea of content/knowledge/activity/choice as adults that we forget that focus is the key to learning and success, not content alone.

It seems the best way to learn is to start doing things without learning all the content, stretch through failure into success, and then get the benefit of "expertise". The reason this works - failure provides context for memory.

Kids do it all the time. They test failures until parents "correct" them.

Finding our way through failure is the uniquely human way of co-opting the innate "fear of death" into a positive memory (and skill) making activity.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why PI is not 4, math is great, and other mysteries.

The other day, I found myself with an interesting problem of approximating a circle with the enclosing square which seems to prove pi = 4. The paradox was forwarded by a most interesting puzzle collector, Surajit Basu, a friend and life long inspiration. See Sonata for Unaccompanied Tortoise for why! Here is the offending paradox: This is an example of how counterintuitive questions can be answered with a little calculus. The key is to realize that no matter how closely we approximate the circle, the orthogonal lines of the approximation formed by inverting the square corners will never actually be tangential to the circle. Note carefully that as you get closer to 90 degrees, the horizontal line is much longer than the vertical. Same goes with the approximation at 0 and 180 - the vertical line is much larger than the horizontal component. If we take a quadrant of the circle - let's say the top left quadrant, moving counter clockwise from to

Architecture, Engineering, Operations - 1

The world has infinitely more stuff to be "done" nowadays. At least in the sense of building/running an institution that uses technology, there are many roles that are involved in making things work. The world of IT and technology in general makes the speed and variety possible. We now have a platform of IT that is globally scale-able if we can put some new thinking to the old problems of "getting things done". There are great organizations that do this well, and they use modern IT principles to achieve this. Fundamental to engineering a modern IT (or infrastructure organization) are the three roles of Architecture, Engineering and Operations. Some would say Architecture is encoded Engineering-history, but for now, we will keep them separate. The popular definitions for these roles are about output delivered or the domain of discourse. The personality drives that determine the actual performance are not discussed, as far as I can see, in a holistic fashion i

Ch10, Ponniyin Selvan, translated with an english prism.

  Kudanthai JothiDar, Chapter 10 Born in the lands of Kudagu (Coorg), the water princess Ponni (Cauvery) desired to reach the abode of her consort, the Sea King (Samudra Rajan). Crossing dense forests and mountains, cavorting with rocks and ravines, she increased her speed. As she headed nearer and nearer to her King, her heart swelled. She bubbled and grew with the ecstasy of the union imagined. Just a short distance more, and the loving embrace of her mind sprung forth into two large arms. She rushed with open wide arms, like a lunging tiger in full sprint. Even so, her arms were hardly equal to her yearning heart's ache. The radiating arms grew into tens, twenties and hundreds. She neared her consort with growing desire. With what did the beautiful maidens and mothers of the Cholas deck this bride, the one with the intense longing to meet her groom, with! How many lush green trees did they drape her with? How many bright hued flowers? What kinds of effervescent perfumes did