trial and error

Experience

As much as sometimes we’d like to just read a book and automatically ‘know’, it typically takes some amount of trail and error. Trial and error comes with time and experience. Small failures become lessons learned. Improvements made in small increments typically stick longer than making huge changes. The idea of experiencing, improving, experiencing, improving is something most understand. Especially if you’ve done anything from ‘couch to 5k training’ or running a marathon (shout out to my mom!). Even though, most of us understand the concept we could be using it more often in everyday life.

Trial

One thing that made my specific college unique was the ability to gain actual experience in the field. After a first full traditional ‘year’, my college had each student switch from real life work back to school on a 3 or 6 month increment. This not only allowed us to gain extremely important experience, but it gave us the opportunity to ‘turn around’ and swap study topics.

If you didn’t go to a university or college which operated in this manner, perhaps you learned a version of the scientific method in grade school. To summarize:

• be curious
• make an educated guess
• do an experiment
• observe results
• communicate findings

With enough experience with the same topic, your experiments might get more involved as you learn different things based on your tests. If we were to apply this generally to every aspect to our lives, think about how much we would uncover!

The ability to experience something in small increments, either by observation or actually by doing it helps every following instance of that activity.

Insights

With the right attitude, a bit of focus and truly being in the moment so many insights can be gained. Either by how your physical or emotional self reacts to the situation. Or simply by seeing how the ‘thing’ interacts with its own environment.

The next time you want to learn something, or have a problem, try out the scientific method in your daily life. See what you learn about yourself and the situation. Break your topic into small pieces. 

Take it one step at a time and allow yourself to be aware of the trail and error. Allow yourself to free-flow think, ask questions of the situation and journal your thoughts! I’d love to hear how it goes!