MM195 - Repetition and Redundancy

Although they are often used in a negative way, both repetition and redundancy are both important concepts when it comes to learning and keeping the system running.

[INTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel.

*Professor Paul*
Hello, welcome back. Yes, indeed I welcome you every day, and are you glad that I welcome you every day or is me welcoming you every single day, every single episode has that become redundant? Today's episode topic is repetition and redundancy when I was a child, I remember my father scolding me for being redundant, said: "You're being redundant". But let's examine both of those Concepts when it comes to education, and learning, and expanding our brains.
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Repetition. How do we learn to do things? Well, how do we learn physical skills? For instance? How do we learn to play the piano? How do we learn to throw a baseball or catch a baseball or a football or what have you or play the guitar? Through repetition, right how many folks are so gifted and so talented that you can hand them a guitar and a pick they will look at it and immediately be able to play a song or a millet e how many people sit down in front of the piano put their hands on it and are immediately able to play the piano.
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You say well obviously just about no one. I mean there may be in history a couple of crazy prodigies who are listening to music and they just sit down and immediately take to it. He said but the rest of us, what do we have to do? Well, we have to engage in the process of repetition. If you've ever listened to it's not fun to listen to a child practice the piano or the trumpet or any musical instrument really it's not fun to listen to them.
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Why? Because they go back over they start and they make a mistake they go back again and make another mistake. We make a different mistake and they go again and again and again and again, but eventually what happens. If they're dedicated eventually their fingers learn to go where their brain needs them to be, right the brain knows what to do, but it has to convince the fingers to do. That's repetition, repetition and redundancy. Both of those are used as pejoratives or they can be used in a negative connotation. You know, if we're talking about, oh I don't like that blank because it's just a bunch of repetition.
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Alright, I don't listen to that guy because he repeats himself or becomes repetitious. You when it comes to education that's something I've been involved in for. I don't know 25 years or so. Educating individuals educating people training them. I've done physical training lots and lots of physical training teaching people to master a physical skill, and I know how to do it and I can teach you how to do it. As a matter of fact, I can sit down with you and over a period of a couple of hours I can show and demonstrate and explain to you everything that you need to perform a certain skill.
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But just because I explained it just because I demonstrated it just because I broke it down step-by-step doesn't mean that in a period of two hours you are going to have mastered that skill. You probably won't have. You'll know how to practice, but in order for you to achieve competency and you know some modicum of skill. What you're going to have to do is you're going to take what you were taught and you're going to have to engage in repetition.
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So repetition isn't necessarily a negative thing, and when I do educational- when I perform, whether as a coach or as an instructor or a teacher or if I'm writing, and I'm creating some type of educational or instructional material. I deliberately build repetition into that work, and the reason I do it is that it has to be reinforced. That is how human beings learn. I know I know that it's easy to say all this is repetitive. This is just this is just a repetitive exercise. Yeah, and sometimes repetitive exercises are good, and sometimes they're very important now, let's examine redundancy.
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What is 'redundancy'? Now if you're using it in the negative, if you're using it as a pejorative being redundant means you're just doing something that someone has already done or you're just repeating or you're following or you're you're doing something that doesn't necessarily need to be done because it already has been. Now when we talk about other things such as Engineers, if you are an engineer, you know that redundancy is not a negative. It's a positive. It's a very important positive for instance an aircraft, an airplane, a jet airliner has numerous redundancy systems.
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So that if one wire breaks, can you imagine if you were on an airplane and you probably never thought about this, but if you are in an airplane, and there were wires and tubes and hoses and you know, all these things, you know, a hydraulic system and a pneumatic system and electronic system. If one screw came loose or if one wire broke or if one, you know pneumatic line broke if that one line breaking would bring down the plane how dangerous would that be? If everything had to work, absolutely 100% all the time, you're probably sitting out there. You're like do you mean that's not the case Paul like an airplane night every piece of every airplane isn't perfect every time it takes off.
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I don't want to scare you but the fact the matter is when Engineers design things like. They put in multiple redundancy systems so that if one fails or if there's an error somewhere the entire system doesn't crash. On ships on Military warships, they build a numerous redundancy system so that if the ship takes damage in one area, it doesn't take down the entire ship if the bridge is hit. I was actually stationed on board an aircraft carrier for two years as part of the Marine Detachment and I learned a lot in two years and one of the things that I learned as they had this thing up on that building like thing on the flight deck, you know, you guys all know what an aircraft carrier looks like, right?
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It's got a big flat top and then it has this building scooted over to the side, right and that's where the steer the ship and that's where the captain is in the slot stuff happens, right? It's like a control tower. Well, I learned when I was on the aircraft carrier that there were numerous redundancy systems built into that ship and that even if during a time of war that the superstructure so they called it if it was completely destroyed. We could still steer and navigate the ship from a different part of the ship because they had built in redundancy systems. Redundancy systems are critical when it comes to emergency things such as firefighting or medical, you know, emergency medical gear.
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You always want to have a redundant system for that. So the words repetition and the words redundancy, they're thrown out and often. They're thrown out in a negative light. They're used negatively. But the fact the matter is, repetition and redundancy are both very important and they can be very important positive Concepts. So think about that next time someone says oh this is just repetitive or oh, this is just redundant take a moment to think.
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You know, what sometimes repetition is very important for Learning and skill maintenance and redundancy can save your life. Yeah, how about that? Alright, ladies and gentlemen, thank you. Once again for being a part of my audience, part of the Morning Mindset podcast audience. I am your host Paul Markel, and I will talk to you again real soon.

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*Alex*

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