So, it's been a while!

I wrote this as a note on my Facebook account, but thought...what the heck...will make a great blog post:

This morning a friend posted an article about Gen 'X'ers and parenting. The article ends with something the author said to her daughter about perseverance:  "Whenever we try something new, we often suck," I explained, "but, without sinking, we never learn to swim."   (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rhiana-maidenberg/generation-x-parents_b_1257602.html)

This made me start to think about some of the other ways I've heard this sentiment presented, which all more or less boil down to "without failure there is no innovation".

A few years ago, my employer paid a consultant a bucket load of money to travel the country and deliver that message.  Unfortunately, attendance was only mandatory for the plebes...not management.  This was a very valid attempt to get the bureaucracy to understand that it's OK to have an idea and express that idea even if it appears to be 'silly/wrong/not normal' etc. - you fill in the adjective.

I like to summarize those sessions as: "how to not be afraid of saying something silly in-front of your coworkers and learn to fly"

Anyway...even before the article from the Gen "X" mom, or the sessions with the consultant, I read one of those little blurbs that Reader's Digest puts at the bottom of the page when an article isn't quite long enough.  It went something like this:

A man was watching his wife prepare the roast beef for Sunday dinner.  As she always did, she cuts the end off of the roast, gave them to the dog, and then continued with the preparation. Her husband finally asked the question that had been driving him nuts for months (they were newlyweds), "Honey, why do you cut the ends off of the roast before you cook it?"  The woman responded with "I don't really didn't know...but that's the way my mom always did it!"

So, the woman called her mom and asked the question and her mom said, "I don't really didn't know...but that's the way my mom always did it!"

So, the woman's mother called her mother and asked the question and her mom said, "Oh, that was just because I never had a pan big enough!"

Several morals to this story:

Don't be afraid to ask questions, and

Sometimes change isn't that bad (except for the poor dogs who no longer get the ends of the roast!)