The Secret of Improving
by Miki SaxonPersonal and professional growth is a major focus for most people—that’s one of the reasons you’re reading this blog.
We research, dissect, write, discuss, preach, teach, and study, all with the goal of improving ourselves.
No matter what you seek to learn/improve think of yourself as a computer.
Huh?
In computing, the term I/O refers to input, whatever is received by the system, and output, that which results from the processing.
Programmers know that the results coming out of the computer won’t be any better than the information given it and this phenomenon is know as “garbage in/garbage out.”
And there you have the secret.
No matter if it’s career-related, relationship-focused personal-internal or something else, I/O applies to everything in life.
What comes out is a function of what you put in.
Blindly accepting everything offered by even the most brilliant source will result in garbage out at some point.
Learning/improving requires critical thinking on your part—no one person, past, present or future, has all the answers.
You need to evaluate the available information, take a bit from here and a bit from there, apply it to your situation and, like a computer, process it.
The result will be at least slightly different from what you started with, because you’ve added the flavor of your own life experiences, knowledge and MAP to the mix—and that’s good, it shouldn’t be an exact copy.
Because, as Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.”
Flickr image credit: FindYourSearch