Career choice: How important is the ability of trial and error for office workers before the age of 30?

People say choice outweighs effort, especially for professionals. How to choose a job that suits you? Which boss do you choose to work with? How to constantly adjust the direction in the work, and finally find the field of deep cultivation, the choice is particularly important.

Once it is wrong, the cost of time and effort is huge, and what is even sadder is that sometimes, we find that there is no way back? What to do then?

Career choice: How important is the ability of trial and error for office workers before the age of 30?

trial! Make the right choice with the least cost.

What is trial and error?

Trial and error is the process of actively looking for errors. In the process of trial and error, based on past experience, try various possibilities, eliminate uncertain options, and finally find the right choice. The cost of trial and error is relatively low. In complex real-world situations, when faced with multiple choices and no clue, trial and error is the smartest and most stupid method.

For example, for fresh graduates, what kind of job is suitable for them? You can't come up with the right answer just by thinking. Then it depends on your situation. For example, choose two or three different jobs, such as majors, hobbies, interests, areas of expertise, etc., and then try them one by one. This method seems to waste time and energy, but it is actually the safest and most stupid method.

Because many things, our imagination is one thing, when things are done is another thing, so we must find the answer from practice. Fresh graduates, young, have the time and energy to allow them to make mistakes.

But trial and error is not an excuse to make mistakes!

There is a line in the movie "The Godfather":

Everyone is not born great, but grows stronger and stronger.

Therefore, we need to keep trial and error before choosing the job that suits us in the end, and before deciding which field we want to develop in, but trial and error is not a reason for you to make mistakes!

Career choice: How important is the ability of trial and error for office workers before the age of 30?

How to understand this sentence? Didn't I just say to actively look for mistakes?

There is a big difference between trial and error. In life, we often see a college student who has just graduated for two years and has changed a dozen jobs and ask him why? He said, I'm trial and error, how do I know what I'm good at if I don't try?

I have tried more than a dozen jobs in two years, and I change jobs in less than two months on average. This is not trial and error, it is evasion, and this is irresponsible.

Such trial and error can only take you further and further down the wrong path. Such trial and error is worthless. So when we are young, when we have time cost, when our life and family pressure are not so great, learning the right trial and error is a work skill that we must master.

What is the correct way of trial and error?

The famous economist Harford, in his book The Power of Trial and Error, introduced us to three effective trial and error methods.

01 Trial and error requires steady small steps, and gradually accumulate experience.

When we are doing a job, there are often many methods in our minds, but we are not sure which method is more suitable? Instead of wrestling with which method works best and wasting time imagining it, take the dumbest method. Yes, it is a trial and error method, one by one.

Career choice: How important is the ability of trial and error for office workers before the age of 30?

While experimenting with our own methods, we can delete methods that fail to demonstrate. In this way, we can also summarize experience and lessons from failed methods, and improve the plan step by step. This is the safe small step, through the continuous process of trial, failure, summary, and re-testing. We take small steps little by little, summarize experience and lessons on the basis of the previous trial and error, and gradually accumulate the experience and lessons, and finally we will be able to quickly find the most suitable method.

02 Trial and error is a closed loop with feedback

Trial and error is not a blind trial, nor is it an excuse for one's laziness! Every process of trial and error is a bridge to the right path, and trial and error is a closed loop with feedback.

This requires us to constantly absorb the errors in the trial and error process, analyze the reasons, and find solutions. If there is no feedback, trial and error is a vain trial.

Just like the college student who has changed more than ten jobs in two years mentioned above, if he does not analyze and reflect on each of his jobs, and he still makes the mistakes he made in the previous job when he goes to the next job, then he Trial and error is ineffective and a waste of time.

American psychologists once did a famous starving cat experiment. He put a hungry cat in a cage with a mechanism. The outside was filled with fish and other food. As long as the cat stepped on the mechanism, the cage would open and the cat could eat the food.

At the beginning, the cat was also very anxious in the cage, jumping up and down until it accidentally stepped on the trap, the cage was opened, and it ate food. Psychologists recorded when it first opened the cage.

The cat was then put back into the cage for a second, third, and more experiments. Psychologists found that as the number of trials increased, the time the cat took to open the cage gradually decreased, and even once the cat opened the cage as soon as it was put in. Through trial and error, the cat finally found the correct way to open the cage door.

The cat's trial and error is the result of constant feedback and analysis. After it stepped on it once, and the cage door did not open, it knew that this method was not feasible, and continued to step on and adjust until the range of errors became smaller and smaller, until it found the correct method.

Career choice: How important is the ability of trial and error for office workers before the age of 30?

We have to learn to be smart cats, make every trial and error worthwhile, and find our way quickly.

03 Create a safe zone for trial and error

No one likes failure, especially critical failures that have a big impact. We try and make mistakes in order to find the right choice and path as soon as possible, but we can't lose hope and confidence because of the failure caused by trial and error. What should we do? Create a safe zone for trial and error.

At work, many small partners choose to change jobs, euphemistically called it trial and error. They're constantly picking the right jobs, but they haven't created a safe zone for their trial and error. If the new job we are looking for is not suitable, and there is no job to do in a short period of time, it will cause a lot of life and psychological pressure to us.

More often, er, we will complain. If we had known earlier, we would have stopped trial and error. Now we can't even guarantee a basic life. This will make us timid in our future work and life, stop moving forward, and just want to carry it in a safe area, and we will lose a lot of momentum.

So at this time, we need to create a safe zone for trial and error. When you change jobs, when you try and make mistakes, you can leave yourself enough living expenses for the next six months. You can also try to see if you are suitable for a new position on the basis of your original job. In short, we just want to give a lot of room for trial and error, that is, this error will not affect us, so that we can get closer and closer to the goal on the right path.