Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday – Experience

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Albert Einstein, Experience, Getting out there, Learning, Living, Spiritual, wisdom

“The only source of knowledge is experience.” – Albert Einstein

Quote provided by: Brainyquote.com

Read about any sport. Now go play the sport you read about. Huge difference right? This is what Albert is referring to. Albert Einstein is well known for his thought experiments but also for his prowess in Math and Physics.

Look at anyone who is gifted in a particular area. All of them practice. All of them do. They gain knowledge of their sport, their gift, or their talent by learning how to do it themselves. Look at any sports hero you admire. Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan started out just as ignorant as the rest of the folks who ever picked up a baseball bat or basketball.

I don’t care what field of study or endeavor you look at. Every person has to start out as a beginner and work there way to expert. Some read about what they need to know to accomplish something, others learn from a coach or mentor, some just grit through it and learn on their own.

Think back to a time you learned to ride a bike, drive a car, or learned how to operate a cash register in your first job. Someone told you how to do it, then they showed you how to do it, and then they let you do it. It took a little time, but you learned. With time, you can now ride a bike, drive a car, and operate a computer or some other complicated machine with ease.

We learn all kinds of things through experience. We learn how to ask a girl out on a date. We learn what it means to be nice or polite. We learn how important it is to keep our commitments to other people. Some of this learning is through trial and error. We ask a girl out on a date and totally flub it up. Then we ask out another girl and it goes a little better. We learn what to say. We learn how to react to the responses a girl gives.

Sometimes experience isn’t so nice. Think about a time you committed to something and couldn’t keep your promise. The person we made the commitment to is upset with us and we feel guilty. We learn that we need to be more careful when committing to something because breaking that commitment hurts worse than the disappointment someone expresses when we tell them we can’t do this or that.

There are so many experiences in a lifetime. All of them teach us something about ourselves and other people. We learn all the time if we pay attention. We learn more if we are willing to get out there and do something. Life is about gaining experience. We need experience to grow. We need to learn what to do and what not to do. Through experience we gain wisdom.

I hope each of you has a great Saturday! The weatherman predicts thunderstorms today. Today will be a day of reading, writing, gaming, and catching a series or movie in the den with Dad. What are you doing today?

Until next time…

Dave

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Daily Ramblings – Funny Friday

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Albert Einstein, failing, Falling, goofs, Improving, Learning, Mistakes, Programming

“Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.” ­Albert Einstein

Only Albert could give us something to ponder while being funny. This brought up a point about the importance of giving yourself a break. You are human. You will make mistakes. You will goof up. You will fall.

Will your mistake end the world? Will your goof destroy your progress? No. You can fix mistakes and goofs. Just realize that making mistakes and goofs are all part of the learning process. Learn from your mistakes. Learn what didn’t work. Learn why it didn’t work.

After re-wiring my brain toward coding again, I realized how silly some mistakes are. Software development languages are quite unforgiving when you screw up syntax. They are also maddening when you think they should do something, and they do something else. Between syntax and logic errors, logic errors are the worst. But, like every other developer before me, there are little hacks to learn, little “tricks of the trade” that allow you to avoid plenty of errors or have a process for finding logic and syntax errors.

The same thing that a software engineer uses can be used in real life when looking at your other projects. Look at the big task, break it down into little tasks, and execute each little task. This is what a computer programmer does because a computer can only work through little tasks to accomplish bigger ones. You must build the code, so your computer knows the variables it will have access to, the functions it will execute, and told when to execute a function or line of code. All these little tasks build up to an end goal, like allowing a person to play a game, do a calculation, or learn if they had enough sleep last week.

We do the same thing when we are looking to accomplish something. We look at the goal. We visualize what the end-state of that goal’s accomplishment looks like. Then we begin breaking the goal down into actionable steps.

I’ve really enjoyed getting back into programming. I haven’t done it seriously since 2005, but it is all beginning to come back quickly. I like the way software engineering requires us to think about what we want to accomplish. Only then can we build code to help us fulfill our desired end.

When you make a mistake and get down on yourself, take some time to contemplate the bigger picture. Each mistake you make helps you move forward—you find out what NOT to do. Learn from these mistakes. They’ll make you stronger—better. I hope all of my readers in the US had a terrific Thanksgiving!

Until next time…

Dave