Entry 24.16

Well, I can’t believe that this is the final week of classes for the semester already. Notice this is the final week of classes, not the final days of the semester. Final exams aren’t over until the 12th of December. So don’t shut off your brains yet. There is still more to complete before your tasks are done in your educational journey in 2024. For some of you, that means finals. For others, there may be projects that you still need to turn in. And for far too many of you, there are work experiences to complete. I know you are tired of hearing about work experiences. Some people say no is the most used word in the English language. But here in the Player Center, “work experiences” might top that list. I’m not even on the formal education side of the house here at Methodist (meaning I’m not responsible for teaching classes or reading work experiences) but even I am exasperated by the topic. But typing that sentence is going to send me down a rabbit hole, so here goes…

How many of you have stopped to think about the downstream consequences for the decisions you are making? And I’m not talking about how the decision affects you later on in life, although that is an important train of thought to have. What I am talking about is how your decisions affect other people. In this case, your decision not to complete and turn in your work experiences on time affects the staff and faculty here who are responsible for reading and approving your work experiences. If I could bottle up all the frustration that you cause the staff by not doing your work experiences, it should scare you how many rooms in this building I would fill in a semester with those bottles. Because when one person doesn’t do one work experience that frustration is very low. But with each missed deadline and each message about them ignored, that frustration grows. Exponentially. It isn’t a linear progression. Most of you probably get a sense of their frustration and let the thought stop there. But what else happens because of it? Frustration doesn’t just evaporate. Like a stinky sock, it lingers for a while after the source is removed. It gets carried around and affects each person that faculty member then encounters. I promise you frustration from work goes home with people. And now your decision to not do your work experiences has the potential to cause strife at home with spouses, children or pets. Or that faculty member stays late at work to grade work experiences that should have been turned in months ago, so they don’t bring their work home with them. Guess what? They are losing out on the most precious resource there is. Time. They have to use time they could be spending with their families to grade work experiences they should have been able to grade during the summer months when they have more time at work because you aren’t here. Guess what that breeds? Frustration and strife for those spouses, children and friends against that faculty member. It would be hard for me not to believe that each of you have experienced that for yourselves. I know I have. I’ve been the kid who gets to see his parents at odds because something at work caused issues that boiled over into the home life. I’ve been the husband and father who has brought stuff home and allowed it to infect my relationships with my wife and daughter. Can I place all the blame on you for that frustration going home? No but it takes a very special person to completed compartmentalize their home life and work life. But can I place some of that blame on you? I think we both know that I can. I’m not asking you to be perfect. Because no one is. What I’m asking you is to think about the unintended consequences of you not completing your work on time. It affects so many more people that just you.

How many of you have seen “The Butterfly Effect”? If you haven’t, I highly recommend that you do. Not for its grand cinematic brilliance, but for its message. What is the butterfly effect and where does it come from? The term is associated with the work of Edward Norton Lorenz, who was a mathematician and a meteorologist. The imagery he used what that of a tornado being caused by the minor perturbations (deviations caused by an outside influence) made by the flapping wings of a butterfly weeks prior to the formation of the tornado. Incredible to think that such a powerful storm could be caused by the tiny disturbances from the fluttering wings of a beautiful butterfly. The idea came to him when weather models were unable to reproduce the weather pattern when using unrounded initial condition data. Or simply put because he didn’t round his numbers for his algorithm, those incredibly small changes in the numbers created a significantly different outcome. His work resulted in the instability of the Earth’s atmosphere being included into the algorithms of weather models. It also resulted in the concept of instability being linked to large dynamic systems that undergo nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos. Ooo boy, this just got good. Remember how I said earlier that frustration grows exponentially? Yup that’s nonlinear dynamics. And does “large dynamic system” sound like a combination of your educational, home, social etc relationships? Sure does to me. But what about that last one?

What is deterministic chaos? Well let’s define chaos first. Chaos: “upredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions”. If we look at chaos theory it is defined as “when the present determines the future but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”. Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnection, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals and self-organization. Really making you think with this week’s install right? Basically what I want you to take away from that is that while on the surface it looks like I could have easily made up the fact that you not doing your work experiences causes frustration for the staff which leads to strife in their home life which then gets passed down to their kids who then act differently because they experienced that environment at home and so on, I did not. If it had only happened once, yes. Then we could say it was completely random. But since it happens all over the world and has since humans began walking the Earth, we can see underneath that surface, the same pattern playing out over and over again. Because while different, they play out in eerily similar ways.

Hopefully, I got you thinking. Not just about how your failure to complete work experiences affects the staff, but how everything you do in life has consequences that you just don’t intend on causing. Even while writing this, I have been thinking about how I need to be better about my own actions and decisions. I didn’t even bring this up for myself, I brought it up for my coworkers, their families and their friends. To be perfectly honestly, this wasn’t even the road I planned on going down today. But that’s what happens when I write these, I go off on tangents, have to do my own research, I learn and grow and hope you do the same. Let’s get back to golf for a second to get a little cheerier. In the 1960’s multiple books came out from authors who didn’t know each other who all came to the same conclusion that the model that best represents the golf swing is a double pendulum (The Golfing Machine, Search for the Perfect Swing). Well fun fact for the day, what does chaos theory use as one of the simplest dynamical systems with chaotic solutions? Yup, the double pendulum. No wonder the golf swing is so hard. It’s absolutely chaotic…