Sleepwalkers
I work with a guy who is absolutely sleepwalking through life. He’s never actually engaged in what he’s doing. He’s just pushing buttons
and not bothering to think about what he’s doing. He doesn’t even think about if what he’s doing makes any sense or not. It’s really a shame, but it’s a good reminder for me to always make sure that I’m not doing the same thing. It’s not really in my nature to do so, but it happens from time to time.
I had a physics teacher in college named Mr. Lindblat. He was a very cool guy and he taught me a lot of stuff but the most valuable
lesson he taught me was to ask myself a question…. Does this make sense?
This was back in the day when physics was done with a slide rule and when you’re using a slide rule, it’s easy to lose your power of ten.
One, ten, a million, they’re all the same place on a slide rule. So he taught us to always check our answers against what we know about reality. For example, if you’re calculating the weight of the sun and you come up with an answer of 750 pounds, then you know you’ve done something wrong simply by asking yourself if the answer you’re getting makes any sense. If you don’t ask yourself that question, then you end up making huge mistakes and this is the sort of question that sleepwalkers never ask themselves.
Is what you’re doing making sense?
