Habits of The Creative Mind essay pt3 12/3/18

I look at mistakes as learning opportunities. It’s nice in the sense that you make a mistake and you can learn from it but then again you made a mistake. I made quite a few mistakes this semester ranging from grammatical mistakes to missing assignments. I remember back to writing my first essay about how eating animals is comparable to racism and how in my first draft it had grammatical errors and sentences that didn’t make sense. I also didn’t really know how to quote sources yet. One mistake I remember was embarrassing, I was stating the title of the book that peter singer wrote about killing and eating is comparable to racism and the title is Animal Liberation. But instead of writing Liberation I wrote Libertarian. Thankfully when I was reviewing the essay with Meghan she caught my mistake. That mistake wasn’t a huge deal, but it was just embarrassing. That mistake was me not paying attention to what I was reading now I always double check on what I’m reading and writing down.

I think most of my mistake that happen are a cause of lack of focus. Early in the semester I realized that I couldn’t do work in my room because I would get distracted by other people, my phone, the internet, and a bunch of other things. Making this mistake thinking I could focus on what I was doing in my room was a mistake. I look back and I remember when I was doing homework one day in my room and I had a thought about football came into my mind and I stopped what I was doing and immediately looked up “how Ohio State football players went on to the NFL?” Next thing you know an hour later and I’m watching news segments on Urban Myer’s scandals and I haven’t got any work done. At that moment I said I can’t do this anymore. I got up and went to the second-floor commons and went into the private study areas and finished the assignment. I realized that being in that environment that was private but open enough to where if I started to get off task I could quickly bring myself back because I would think that people were going to get mad at me for not doing my work. After I made that change my productivity doubled, maybe even tripled. I found myself getting work done fast and the quality of my work went up too. Those lack of focus errors decreased and I found myself getting more into what I was doing and having more fun doing it. Because I made that change everything got better. From that experience I learned that being around people, not people sitting with me but people around me, helps me stay on task. This was the first time I learned something new about myself and how I stay on task and improve the quality of my work and improve my productivity.