Goof it up

A couple of days ago, I congratulated a friend of mine for getting promoted. I would not be telling this to you if he was indeed promoted. He was not- I had by mistake, congratulated him for somebody else and in turn ended up rubbing salt on his fresh wounds. Yes, I had goofed up.

Dear reader, this was just the latest addition to my ever growing list of goof ups. I forget to add sugar while preparing tee or worse in some cases add something else. All the 364 days of the year I would remember it, but when the day arrives, I forget to wish happy birthday to my best friend. However hard I prepare my presentation, I tend to miss a very important piece while delivering it. Looking at these problems, I just asked my self - Is there a problem with me? Why do I make so many goof ups? Am I the only one goofing around? There were questions. But there were no answers. I decided to find answers to these questions myself. I looked around, observed situations and asked various people. What I found was pretty fascinating. And that is what I’m going to share with you today.

Since the time I started taking notice, I found almost everybody goofing up some time or the other. I found some of the biggest names in politics, sports, entertainment goofing up big time. I’ll give you an example. A friend of mine was who works for a small firm told me that the VP of his company once forwarded a very critical data to all the employees, and in order to cover up his goof up, he put the fire alarms on while recalling the sent message. For those of you who are not impressed by my observation, here is some scientific research work done by – Dr. Maria Woloshynowych who is lecturer in clinical safety in Imperial College London. She particularly worked to figure out the reasons or patterns of failure in medical sciences. “We all make errors irrespective of how much training and experience we possess or how motivated we are to do it right”

I was relieved. I was so glad to know that I was not the only one goofing around. Almost everybody goofs up.

But wait a second. We humans are supposed to be the most intelligent creatures ever walked on the planes of this earth. And in humans, even the brightest ones have been found making the silliest of the mistakes. How can that be true? What could be the reason? These questions led to me this book: Why we make mistakes: “How we look without seeing, forget things in seconds, and are all pretty sure we are way above average”
In this book the author attributes our goof ups to the way our brain is wired. He suggests that “What we believe is what we see” – it’s not the other way round. We think that what we see is actually there, but in some cases for variety of reasons that isn’t the case. Our brain fills in a lot of details in what we see and that can lead to a lot of errors or so called goof ups. We look but don’t always see.

This reasoning sounds sufficient enough. But the engineer within me refused to accept it. It needed something that can be generalized, something that can be modeled. So I came up with my own interpretation and modeling of goof ups. It’s a bit technical and requires you to have basic knowledge of .NET framework.
Consider your brain as .NET CLR and yourself, the user of the brain as an application. Remember whenever I say CLR, it means brain and whenever I say application it means your body. At runtime (while you are alive) you (application) host the brain (the CLR). The CLR has a number of threads running in parallel to handle multiple basic tasks like listening, looking and feeling. The CLR provides you ways to create threads i.e. you can yourself start doing multiple things together like driving and talking on phone. What it does not provide or maybe we are yet to explore is a way to synchronize application created threads. So in the lack of any synchronization mechanism, application threads more often than not end up corrupting each other’s data. And this corruption in my humble opinion leads to goof ups.
Going by this theory, we can avoid goofing up by having only one thread at a time that it by doing only one thing at a time.

As we all know now that goof ups do happen regardless of how smart or expert we are. We also know that in this world normalcy is driven by what majority of people do. And since majority of people goof up, goof ups are considered normal. So if you have not been goofing up recently, it’s time to return to normalcy. It’s time to goof up :)!

Cheers!
Amit