Perfection and the learning process.

My wife and I, have a disagreement, that comes up from time to time, about whether or not I am perfect. She asserts rather strongly that I am. While I know, in no uncertain terms that, I am not even close and never will be. But, my goal is to do the best I possibly can at whatever I set my mind to.

And in many cases, with many things, I do actually do a better job than most other people. Many of my successes can be attributed to failure and negative feedback. How can this be you wonder?

Well you see, negative feedback is more than just insults and name calling. Negative feedback is a tool that can be used for course correction, much like a ship captain sailing by the position of the stars. In its simplest form negative feedback would be something like, your goal is that way, or this way is not the right way.

Imagine for just a moment that all forms of negative feedback just vanished from the universe.It suddenly would be impossible to tell someone that they are not doing well, or that they are heading in the wrong direction. If this were to actually happen, people would still fail, but nobody would be able to express why. In fact, the rate of failure would skyrocket because nobody could correct their errors in any way other than random guesswork.

If you are always winning or succeeding you are never learning. The way that we learn is by making mistakes. When we make mistakes we find out what things do not work in getting us to our goal. At first, we make great big mistakes that are wrong in so many different ways. With negative feedback we can be told exactly how far off our last attempt was from success. We compare our failures with one another and see which ones were closer to our goal and which ones were further from it. We do more of the kinds of things that brought us closer to success.

Gradually we begin to move in the right direction and make less and less mistakes. By being told that we are doing the wrong thing and just how wrong it is, we learn to zero in on the right thing.

Whether the source of negative feedback is a mentor, the reading of a map, a walk-through(for a video game) or the image in our mind of what success will look like, it works the same every time. We compare where we are with where we want to be and use negative feedback to adjust our course.

Without negative feedback we could never learn anything new or get better at anything that we already know or do. Succeeding at anything would become completely random. With no way of improving people would stagnate. Life would become completely chaotic and uncertain with no hope of ever changing it.The earth would spin out of control and we would all explode.

Okay, so maybe that last part is a small exaggeration, but you get the idea.

Strive for perfection. Celebrate imperfection.