What I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger
I’ve always been pretty good on picking up on details and learning things pretty fast. When I was learning to be a machinist back in my early days, I loved the challenge of figuring out how to make things from a solid block of steel. In the Air Force when I was a radar specialist, you could usually find me out in the workshop sitting in the middle of a piece of equipment trying to figure out how it was made and how it worked. When I became a trainer with Dale Carnegie I spent countless hours listening to audios and reading books on how to be an even better trainer which led me to being a master trainer.
I love figuring things out.
Unless…
If there is any math involved with something, I’ll drop it like a handful of angry hornets.
I convinced myself at an early age that math and I don’t see eye to pi. I even failed math one year in elementary school which fed my excuse of ‘I can’t do it”, and so, even today I hesitate to do even the simplest of equations.
As I have been thinking about this whole math thing, my wife said, “You know, as a machinist you had to do engineering math to create the objects you created, in the air force you had to do electrical engineering math to figure out bandwith and electrical circuits, so you’ve always done math. So what are you afraid of?”… Mic drop… Elvis has left the building.
She’s right! I was so blind in my evasion of anything math related I failed to see that when something was interesting to me and I wasn’t afraid of making a mistake I did it gleefully, but make the problem around the math itself, and I ran like a scared Jackalope the other way.
Now that I know that, I cannot not know it, and so I’ve started becoming more open to learning math.
What do you talk yourself out of because you think you can’t learn it?
If you faced the fear, and did it anyway what could be the worst thing that could possibly happen?
Please don’t make the fear of making a mistake so very painful that it keeps you from trying.
It’s in these little triumphs that we build our confidence which lets us try again. I wish I had been told that when I was younger. I would have done so many more things and gone so many more places than I have. I just didn’t think I could.
So, go ahead, take a chance, knock on the door to failure… that’s where confidence lives. If he doesn’t know you are there on the other side, the door won’t be opened to you. Won’t you take a chance on you?
Make an Impact.
