What Are You Doing Wrong?

If your answer is “absolutely nothing,” then you can count lying as the first thing.

Look, no one’s perfect, but some of us make mistakes that are easily correctable. The biggest problem is that we don’t know we’re making the mistake in the first place. Therein lies the issue.

So how can we solve this vicious cycle? Honestly, I don’t claim to be the expert on not-making mistakes (in fact, I make quite a few), but my solution to the awareness problem involves feedback and data.

Usually, the only way to know if you’re on the wrong path is to reflect on the progress already taken, and you can’t really evaluate progress without data. Therefore, pausing every now and again to determine whether or not you’ve been successful and/or are you still on course to achieve your objective(s) is vital to eliminating more costly mistakes.

Additionally, timely feedback is important to correcting mistakes. While course feedback and professor evaluations accomplish this requirement, it’s always troubled me that my opinion never affected my experience; instead, my feedback would help someone else. Granted, this may be valuable, but I would have preferred more timely solutions to influence my professors’ behavior.

Perhaps we enjoy our simple states of ignorance; I know I’m guilty of this at times (especially when it comes to opening mail with expectantly unpleasant news), but I know this is not progress; it’s stasis. I know I make mistakes. For example, I just used two semi-colons in one sentence. Either that was wrong, or my attempt to diagnose it as a mistake was wrong. Either way, I should determine which is incorrect to avoid making that same mistake in the future.