Anecdotal Learning

They say, “learn from others’ mistakes, life is too short to make all the mistakes by yourselves”. Observations make for a great teacher, if you are willing to learn, that is. You can observe your own actions and outcomes and you can observe what happens in stories. Stories have always fascinated me. It’s astonishing, how much impact a short story can have.

A story is like an attractive packaging for an otherwise dry and unattractive message that is easily forgotten. Stories can make a message fly distances, last for centuries and make retention of the wisdom much easier.

This is my attempt to look at simple incidents that could be used as reminders of some useful principles.

Observation: Understanding what to copy is also an art.

As a joke goes

Child : My younger brother copies birds.

Teacher: That’s great. Does he mimic a lot of birds?

Child: No. He eats worms.

Observation is good. But understanding what to observe and taking away the most meaningful part is crucial.

The path of least resistance

A man is looking for something under a street lamp at night. Another man sees him and comes to help, asking what he is looking for. The man says I dropped my keys. After looking for it, in-vein, for a while, the bystander asks him, “do you remember where you dropped them?”. The man says, pointing to a dark corner of the street “I dropped it there?” The bystander, amused, asks “then why are you looking for it here” and the man says “because its too dark on that side”

Often deep down, we know where the problem is, and yet we choose to look in another direction because it’s easy to do that. We avoid the hard work and fool ourselves that we are fixing the problem. In reality, we are just wasting our time by taking the path of least resistance.

The big picture – Missing the forest for trees

Once Sherlock Holmes and Watson go on a camping trip. In the middle of the night, Sherlock wakes Watson and pointing to the open sky above them, asks “do you observe anything?”. Having learnt a few tricks from Sherlock, a half asleep Watson says “Oh I see that the sky is clear and starry. Tomorrow is going to be a sunny day”.

Then Sherlock points, “Did you realize that our tent is stolen?”

Sometimes, we are so focused on minor things like spelling mistakes, fonts, color combination in a presentation that we forget to check if the presentation is communicating the actual message that we want to communicate.