okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
More advice from a doctor
...achieve competency in remarkably similar ways, despite working in disparate fields. Primarily, they recognize and remember their mistakes and misjudgments, and incorporate those memories into their thinking. Studies show that expertise is largely acquired not only by sustained practice but by receiving feedback that helps you understand your technical errors and misguided decisions....He kept a log of all the mistakes he made over the decades, and at times revisited this compendium when trying to figure out a particularly difficult case. He was characterized by many of his colleagues as eccentric, an obsessive oddball. Only later did I realize his implicit message to us was to admit our mistakes to ourselves, then analyze them, and keep them accessible at all times if we wanted to be stellar clinicians.
The quote is from the book How Doctors Think.
I actually think you can learn a lot from your successes as well as your mistakes. It is worth keeping a log of all of your legs - successes and failures - and revisiting the log from time to time. Even if that makes you an "obsessive oddball."
