As a Speech & Language Pathologist, I (Alaina) am driven to continually improve my methods. I don't believe this is an unusual drive, and over the years I, like the professionals around me, have been advancing my knowledge and skills. The services I provide are becoming more and more effective. But recently I have been thinking about making this a more robust process.
It is more appealing to improve a lot and quickly and steadily rather than a little bit and slowly and haphazardly.
So, my ears perked last summer, when I heard a clip of a show on Minnesota Public Radio. Kerri Miller was interviewing Tim Harford about his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. I immediately downloaded the podcast, and then added myself to a long request list to get this book from my library. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got to the front of the line, picked up the book, and began reading.
This sentence, his recipe for successfully adapting, has been reverberating in my head ever since: "The three essential steps are: to try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; to make failure survivable, because it will be common; and to make sure that you know when you've failed" (p.36).
It has given me a lot to think about, which I'm looking forward to sharing in this series of posts about improvement. The posts that follow will go into detail about this process of improvement. But for now, I want to end here, so that you may reread the quote from above, and so that it may reverberate in your head as well.
