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.
