My favorite lesson to be learned from Albert Einstein is number 5, "Make mistakes." I learned how important this step is to creativity and how liberating it is when I went to MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as a Visiting Scientist in the late 1980's. I remember my surprise in my first brainstorming session in a class in MIT's stellar Department of Linguistics. We were really brainstorming. People were shouting out the most ridiculous ideas, the dumbest suggestions, the most far-fetched possibilities with no inhibitions and without embarrassment. At first I was stunned. I couldn't believe my ears. But soon the ideas came faster and were better, more clever, and before too long we had a very good hypothesis for the solution to our problem.
MIT, of course, ranks in the top 10 institutions of higher learning in the world. My regular school, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ranks 42nd in the world. That's nothing to sneeze at. I'm talking the whole world. But at Carolina, we would have been embarrassed to offer the bad ideas that we had to go through in order to get to the good ideas in that class at MIT. We would has sat more quietly, holding back, waiting until we felt more sure of what we had to say. I was never in on a brainstorming session at UNC where any of the ideas were as bad as those at that first session at MIT or where such an elegant solution was reached in such a short amount of time. The reason? At MIT, the students were not afraid of making mistakes. They were not afraid of being wrong. They knew that you have to go through a lot of garbage before you find gold and they joyfully did so.
I felt liberated. I had been set free. It was okay to think big, think wild, make mistakes, try things out, try things on. My whole approach to learning changed as a result of being in the environment at MIT. While I love Carolina and I learned a great deal there about linguistics and had wonderful professors, I learned my most important lesson at MIT. It's okay to be wrong. In fact, in linguistics, you want to make a claim about language that is strong enough that you might be wrong, that someone may know a language that disproves your claim. And you need to know that you have advanced knowledge by doing that, by discovering something about language that is NOT true.
All of the linguists I admire do this type of research and publication. They make strong, explicit claims about the nature of language, just begging their audiences to come up with counter-examples. Those counter-examples may be re-analyzed and resolved or they may shoot their theories down. Either way, you have learned, and you have taught.
Because of my experience in the brainstorming session in the class at MIT, I was able to be creative, to imagine a theory of Albanian verbs and their subjects and objects that far exceeded what I had planned to do in my dissertation prospectus. As a result, my dissertation was a thousand times better than it would have been, and MIT published it as the third in their series of Occasional Papers in Linguistics. I surprised my professors back in Chapel Hill when I mailed them their copies of my draft, pleasantly surprised them. My work was cited by many linguists coming after me.
Hard work becomes fun when you follow Einstein's rules.
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