Transcriber: Marssi Draw Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
...six months ago, and I emailed asking if I can please come.
I just wanted to sit in the audience
and watch to learn more about Cambodia.
And they said, "Sure, you can come.
You will be doing your talk on the first morning."
And I said, "Oh, talk. Okay."
So, I'm going to talk to you for just three minutes
about the importance of why you need to try
to make more mistakes.
Because everybody here,
no matter what, everybody has something
that you would like to do,
but that you're scared to do.
And the reason you're scared to do it is
because you think you will fail horribly
and everything will go wrong.
So, I'm going to tell you that it is important
to make those mistakes, and you have to try to
for very scientific reasons, like this:
Number one, learning.
The way that you learn is by making mistakes,
in the same way that muscles are built.
What this means is that
when you are in a gym, for example,
and you are lifting some kind of weight
that is too strong for you to lift
and you get that kind of quivering,
and you can't lift it,
what is actually happening is little muscle fibers inside,
some of them are tearing, literally tearing.
And over the next two days,
the muscle fibers repair themselves.
Every time they repair,
they repair themselves a little stronger,
and a little big bigger to adapt for future use.
So, like there is a saying,
"No pain, no gain."
And it's the same with the brain.
So, please take a second, and... take ten seconds,
and look at these two sets of words.
Okay.
In multiple tests,
they found that people remember this second set of words
three times as much as they remember the first set of words.
And neuroscientists have studied why,
it's when you are looking at
these words and you find a little gap,
your brain has to struggle for a second.
It actually is kind of failing.
It doesn't know what it is at first
and it takes a second to fill in the gap,
and then it figures it out.
And that one second of struggle
makes all the difference in the world.
That's why you retain the knowledge
on the right hand side more than the left.
You remember things you learned with some failures
and with some mistakes,
more than the things were easy.
So, to learn more effectively,
you need make more mistakes.
Doing what you know is fun,
but doesn't improve you.
So reason number one why you ned to make more mistakes
is learning.
Number two is that quantity leads to quality.
And this comes from a story about a pottery class.
There was a university class
where they teach pottery making, I guess.
And the teacher tried an experiment one day,
or one semester I should say.
At the beginning of class for the whole semester,
he said, "Ok, class, I'm going to do an experiment."
I'll stand in the middle to do it right here.
He said, "Everybody on the left-hand side of the class,
for the entire semester, you are going to work
on just one pot, all semester.
And at the end of semester,
you will be graded on the perfection of that one pot.
He said, "Everybody on the right-hand side of the class,
you are going to be graded sheerly on quantity.
I don't care what you make,
I don't care what it looks like, I won't even look at it.
But in the last day of class,
I'm going to bring in my bathroom scale,
and we're going to weight it.
Anybody who has made over 15 pounds of pots, gets an A.
Anybody who made over 14 pounds of pots,
gets a B. C, etc.
So that's it. So the whole semester,
this half of room was working
just on one pot all semester.
This half of room will just throw in
pieces of clay on anything and it didn't matter,
they were just messing around.
On the final day of class,
the teacher brought in a few outside observers,
I guess they were pottery aficionados,
that came to look at these pots.
And he didn't tell the judges
which half of room the pots came from.
And maybe you are not surprised,
but all of the best pots in the final day
came from this half of class.
Because what they found is that all semester,
this half of class just kept trying stuff,
doing things, and making mistakes,
and doing experiments,
and getting so much experience making pots
that they got so much better.
Whereas this half had spent the whole semester
coming up with grandiose theories,
and at the end of semester
had nothing more to show for it
than some fancy theories and a mediocre pot.
So, anyway. Why you need to make more mistakes?
Number one, it enhances your learning.
Number two, it's that quantity, just doing things,
and making mistakes, and messing up,
in the end leads to better quality anyway.
And lastly, I went to a music school,
I went to a jazz school in Boston,
called Brooklyn School of Music.
And there is a common saying in jazz that
if you're not making mistakes,
you're not trying hard enough.
In classical music, everybody aims for perfection.
But in jazz, it's like if somebody gets up there and plays a perfect solo,
you kinda go "um!".
But if somebody gets up there and they're reaching for new notes,
they are hitting some occasional squeakers,
you go, "yeah, right on!"
So, and lastly it's a lot of more fun.
Thanks!
(Applause)