Change or No Change

                        CHANGE or NO CHANGE

I am sure most of my readers have heard the phrase “practice makes perfect.” If you are like me, you probably didn’t know where that originated. I was curious and looked it up and found that it had various uses in Greek time but was introduced first in the United States in the “Autobiography of John Adams.”

The thrust of this admonition I think means that if you keep doing things over and over, you will improve, and at some point you will perfect that skill.

I know this is true because I am not a walker. I am much more a couch potato. However, when I was away a couple summers ago on an island for three months, I started walking my dogs every day. First day I tired after about a quarter mile. So I walked a quarter mile for about a week and then ventured forth a little farther along the path. Each week, I ventured further. By the end of the summer, I was easily walking six miles a day.

Now for you runners or serious athletes, that might not seem like much of an accomplishment but for me, it was Olympic Medal work!

Of course I didn’t keep it up over the winter, and when I returned to the island, I could walk only a mile.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that if you stop practicing, you have to start again at square one.

Many of my readers have probably also read at one time or another Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

I understand what he was saying, too, even though it seems to contradict Adams. Einstein was saying through trial and error one finds his way to the answer. If you try one approach and it fails and you make no changes in that approach, why would you expect anything but failure?  You will have to try many things before you may happen on the best answer.

I resolve these differences, using my examples, to mean that if I had kept walking only a quarter of a mile, I would not have known one day I could walk six miles.  But repeating my little accomplishment and then forging on in an attempt to see if I could do better rewarded me rewarded with success.

  

Doing the same thing again and again without change may equate with insanity, but making minor modifications or even small attempts at improvement can produce very good results.