The Unexpected

"Do you find it's helping you become a better writer?" A question my brother asked me the other day.

It may be helping me become a better writer but, more importantly, it's helping me become a better thinker. It's forcing me to go through my days with more curiosity. To ask better questions.

Schools, for example, are set up to teach how to do things a certain way. Although I enjoyed math, I really did not like how I had to show all the "right" steps in order to get full points. If I had a question, I had to put up my hand (and I may not even get picked). They were teaching me how to do things but they were not teaching me how to think for myself. And if I got an answer wrong... Well... No happy face sticker for me!

The goal was to get 100% but in life this is impossible. There's no such thing as perfection. Even the best in the world fail more than 50% of the time. The ultimate achievement for a batter in Major League Baseball is to have a batting average over 0.400. That means they're aiming to get over 40%! The league wife average generally ranges under 0.300. These are the best in the world!

So this blog is teaching me something different than what I thought it would but the results are much better than I expected.
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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …”
— Isaac Asimov

Life is about the unexpected. In order to experience the unexpected, we need to take action. We need to be willing to fail. We need to do something different.

The unexpected is what stands out.