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Quote of the Day: Experience
“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.” — Vernon Sanders
Boy, isn’t that true. I cannot think of all of the times I flunked a test I did not know I was taking. Fortunately, even though I paid in hide a few times, my misjudgments have never resulted in death, mine or others. Yet.
As the saying goes, good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Published in General
Yeah. Same here.
On the upside, one learns more from one’s mistakes than one ever learns from one’s successes.
My Dad had a saying “Fail often, fail small, fail safe” when confronted with choices. If you never try, you never learn.
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Many likes on this. How true.
There’s also: “Experience is the best teacher, but the tuition is high.” The internet says this is a Norwegian proverb. But there’s another Norwegian proverb. The last saying is from the philosophical dialogues of Gosden and Correll.
In my previous line of work (hospital pharmacy IV technician) I held children’s lives in my hands all day every day. I am proud to say that none of my mistakes (which were vanishingly few) ever made it out of the pharmacy. That’s more than I can say for some of the pharmacists who were my supervisors. No one checked their work.
I mixed everything from antibiotics and anti-cancer medications to “total parenteral nutrition”, and some of my work was in response to emergencies. I was aware that one mistake could mean death or injury. One time, I happened to be walking by the work station of another technician, and fortunately noticed that she was reconstituting an antibiotic with potassium chloride instead of sterile water. That could have resulted in the death of a patient, and if I had not noticed the error, it might have left the pharmacy. Whew!
How did the tech take the correction?
The truth is that we learn nothing from our successes. It is only with failure that we gain knowledge. Hell, that is why I am so damned smart!
I’m getting smarter every day.