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March 9, 2003
mark thomas If anyone was inside my head while I was learning something new, they would go insane. My typical train of thought is “What does this do? Shit, I don’t know, where does this go? Lemme try this. No? Why? Why didn’t that work? Let’s try this. Why didn’t that work? Oh, wait, that worked! I wonder why…” All those thoughts fly by with tremendous speed, and at the end of the day I know what I’m doing extremely well and extremely thoroughly because I went through every possible mistake before reaching the one true way. Having spent all day or all month doing something wrong makes me respect the right way of doing some particular task. I don’t do things in orderly fashion. I attack problems, and I endeavor to humiliate them. Sometimes I open an instruction manual of some sort, and get instantly antsy and impatient. Within minutes I return to good old trial and error, a learning technique which has never failed me. Maybe I was influenced by a Charlie Brown cartoon I read while in grade school. I still remember it, although by now the verbiage is probably not precise. As I remember it, Charlie Brown visits Lucy at her psychiatrist’s desk, and Charlie Brown says he feels like a failure. Lucy says that that’s OK, because the only way to learn is through failure. Charlie Brown remarks that that makes him the smartest person in the world. Ha ha. He might not have simply said it deadpan like that. He might have yelled it in that way the Peanuts characters yell, where they yell so loud that the other characters in the frame do a spontaneous somersault. Whether inspired by Charlie Brown or some obtuse school of hard knocks that I masochistically put myself through at every opportunity, I think I’ve learned more from failure (mine and others’) than I could ever learn from all the instruction manuals in the world. During freshman orientation at Oberlin College the president of the college delivered a speech that made an impact on me. His point, and I believe his exact words, were “Screw up big time.” He said that this was college, not reality, and this was the best time in life to make mistakes and learn from them, because screwing up only makes you smarter. Of course you have to be aware that you are screwing up or that you did screw up to be able to learn from the folly of your ways. Or rather, all affairs in life must be carried on with the assumption that you can and will screw up, that the potential for idiocy is ever present, and that in many cases success or failure are subjective. Or does that go without saying? I think it bears emphasis even if it is self-evident. The art of learning from mistakes does not limit itself to avoiding an identical mistake under identical circumstances, nor does it impose lessons learned from one situation onto unrelated circumstances of another. The art in this type of learning is to recognize the fundamental value of the lesson without taking a single leap in logic and projecting it into a philosophy of existence. Pardon the sarcasm. By my senior year at Oberlin a constant refrain in my mind was “Gotta stop screwing up. *Got* to stop screwing up. Reality is coming…” That’s still my refrain. That’s what makes me so damn smart. And y’know what? I like myself!
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