Daily Ramblings – Wisdom Wednesday – Arthur Ashe

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Arthur Ashe, Learning, Making Mistakes, moving forward, Perfecting, Self-doubt, The Journey, wisdom

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe

I don’t know about you, but I am always doubting what I do. Is it good enough? Is it right? Will people like it?

When I was younger, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. If you are not familiar with the game, it allows players to create their own fantasy worlds where players go on adventures, rescue damsels in distress, fight dragons, and other creatures commonly found in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. For the game to work, you need a Dungeon Master (DM) who creates a world, the adventures the players will embark on, and acts like a judge when game play needs an outside advocate. I enjoyed writing the stories and creating these worlds. It was great fun getting the feedback from the players that were part of my game and watching them enjoy spending time in my world.

Jump ahead 30 years and I am in a doctoral program specializing in Information Technology. In the 13 years I was in the program I was writing 10-25 page papers every week. Needless to say, writing has been something I figured I would be good at, since I finished my doctoral program with a 4.0 grade average. I also realize that at some point I will be too old to work any type of job that requires manual labor or something as physically taxing as my service in the military. So, here I am, writing on this blog, working on books, and starting to figure out how to publish various essays I come up with to Medium.

The point I am trying to make is that regardless of what or who you want to be, what goals you want to achieve, or where you want to go in life, you have to start somewhere. Like the quote says, you have to begin with whatever you have at the time. This is wise advice because you will never be good at anything you try until you begin doing it. If you pay attention, you will run across people who will give you feedback. You will learn from other people who have already done what you are trying to do.

So you start doing and learning and doing some more. Then one day you figure out that you really don’t want to pay the price that this “thing” requires of you. That’s ok. Set your sails for a different shore. Try something else. It is the doing in life that brings rewards, not just the winning. Once you’ve won, it’s over. Once you accomplish a goal, it’s done. Now it’s off to the next adventure.

Every person you can think of that has made a big dent in this world, started somewhere. They either didn’t know what to do or doubted themselves. They started. They committed. They gave it their best shot. If you never start or take a risk you will never accomplish anything worth accomplishing. Keep plodding forward. It will be worth every step.

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Daily Quote – George Bernard Shaw – Making Mistakes

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George Bernard Shaw, Making Mistakes, The phases of learning

Today’s quote:

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” – George Bernard Shaw

Those of us that make mistakes are delving into areas that we are unaccustomed to. This is the very nature of “stretching” ourselves to achieve something. These “somethings” are the goals we set for ourselves. It doesn’t matter what goals you set for yourself, they are yours. Making mistakes is a natural part of growth.

Here’s something I learned in the Army. When learning something new, we first crawl. This crawling is reading about the thing we are attempting to learn. We learn all of the parts of a task required to perform it and we begin walking ourselves through these steps. This is the place we called unconscious incompetence. We don’t know what we don’t know.

The next phase is the walking phase. At this point, we have a pretty good grasp of a task and are moving through the performance of it at a quicker pace. We are still making mistakes, but we now are at the point where we know what we don’t know or what is called conscious incompetence.

The walking phase is followed by the running phase. This is the phase where we can perform the task but still need to give some thought to it while we are performing the task. This is the area called conscious competence.

The final phase of learning is the sprint phase or unconscious competence. We are now at the point of mastery where we are so proficient in a task that we can achieve a “flow”. The task is completed without thinking. It is automatic. This is the final phase of task acquisition known as unconscious competence. We own this task and it has become part of our toolbox.

Keep each of these phases in mind when you are attempting to learn something new. Plan on making mistakes. This is a natural part of the learning process and is required if we are to gain from the achievement of learning or taking on a new project in our lives.

That’s it for today folks!

Until next time…

Dave