Falling On Your Behind Aint So Bad!
Just a quick snippet before I head off to do battle with the arrogant, rude little snot that is my back pain consultant...
Kim sent me THIS LINK all about the ability to learn and create and it's well worth a read. It certainly made me feel a whole lot better about some of my failures!
posted by The Shepton Witch @ 08:32
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5 Comments:
what link? :-)
Hope your back is closer to being sorted!
D'oh, butterfingers typed the href bit in wrong - sorry!
New on my back in the next post...
I went to the link, but it required membership of the New York Times, which I dont' have. Oh well. :(
That's annoying - when I followed the link from email the first time, it just opened up, but when I tried again today, it asked me to join.
Oh well, sorry about that. It was just an interesting article that said that people who see themselves as gifted and talented can often set a cycle of boxed in thinking, which will cause them to fear being 'wrong' and not seen as the geniuses they were painted to be when young, which limits their creative ability.
The people who don't see themselves as talented, experts or particularly gifted are willing to make more mistakes, as they don't have a 'position' to maintain, which allows them to unleash the maximum amount of ability, allows them to 'fail' and try again, and ultimately can lead to greater success than the prodigy.
That's sort of how it went, only much better written and more lucid. It just made me smile as I've fallen on my bum so many times that I figure I must be due for a 'win' soon!
Oh yeah. I have that problem. I was shipped off to a school for the academically gifted (too late, as I had already grown lazy) and the other students who had been there years made me feel small because they had been taught more than me over the years and I had no idea about their methodology. I made tonnes of mistakes and felt very out of place. I loathed it.
Ever since then, I've never really tried to use my nouse. I dropped out of uni (twice) and just plod along with my work, concentrating more on my personal pursuits. This way, failure is never an option.
Overall, my brains and creative problem solving techniques will never benefit my community at large.
Strangely, we did a workshop day at my last firm when we were given a group problem solving exercise with a time limit. Each person had one bit of information. The object was to determine which information was relevant and discard the rest to figure out the answer to a question. Everyone read out their bits and by the time they got to mine, I knew the answer. I'd already figured it out.
Once the facts were all read out (you couldn't see anyone else, you had to rely on them to transmit it orally), everyone started trying to work out the answer. Several times I tried to offer my suggestions, but kept getting shot down as being impractical. So, I wrote the answer down on my pad and stayed stum.
Our group was the only group over that six week period of daily workshopping that failed the exercise; going over the time and not getting an answer. Anyways, the point is at the end of the exercise the assessor told us the answer and, when she did, I showed the correct answer to a team member on my left, who piped up and informed the assessor I had it written down.
The assessor asked why I hadn't said anything. I told her I tried but no-one wanted to know. [She obviously wasn't very observant, though I didn't tell her that!] She then informed me I wasn't very helpful and could have tried harder. But, why should I have piped up if the others weren't willing to listen, thinking my ideas stupid?
I failed that exercise. In fact, that was the last time I ever used my brains at work. Now I just plod along like the others and pretend to be just as mediocre. It makes for happiness.
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