Gs1145 Unit 8 Assignment 1

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May 6, 2014 Anthony Dowell GS1145 Unit 8 Assignment 1 “If You Don’t Make Mistakes…” The quotation that I selected was “If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake” made by Frank Wilczek. My first reaction to this quotation after reading it was that it absolutely hold true. The point that the author is trying to get across is that if a problem is easy, it can be solved without making a mistake because we already know the answer and do not have to ponder. For instance, one plus one equals two. This is a simple problem to me that does not require much thought. But on the other hand, solving the hunger crisis is not simple and requires much thought. I feel that the author has successfully made his point. To express this in other words, if you are working on a hard problem, you are going to make mistakes. It’s easy to expect perfection from ourselves and/or the fear the judgment that comes with “messing up”. Even at its worse, we learn from those errors to really dive into the problem for a successful result. That is not a new concept, but it is one that is often forgotten. Mistakes are actually indicators that you are actually trying to succeed, so without them you are not doing much at all. I did not know anything about the author before reading his quotation. It did make me curious to find out something about him. Frank Anthony Wilczek is an American theoretical physicist, mathematician and a Nobel laureate. He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This quotation relates to the work we are doing in GS1145 in that it stresses the importance of taking hard problems and working through them - mistakes and all. By making mistakes we are able to learn from them and are really challenged to come up with core solutions. This includes working
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