Yesterday, we talked about seeing the things that are missing. Seeing the errors in our thinking that are hard to see.
I used this example yesterday:
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During WWII, the Royal Air Force (RAF) brought in a mathematician to figure out where they should add armor to their planes to keep the Germans from shooting them down. They asked Abraham Wald to count the bullet holes in each area of the planes. Based on that data, they wanted him to make recommendations where the extra armor should be placed.
Wald passed along his recommendation for where the extra armor should go, WITHOUT counting bullet holes. He told them to put better protection on the areas of the planes that had not been hit by a single bullet.
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What were the RAF leaders missing that Wald knew? What was the missing piece?
The planes that didn’t come back.
All of the planes in the hangars that had bullets in them had made their way home. They did NOT get shot down. The planes in the hangars were the success stories, not the failures.
If you wanted to know what happened to the planes that got shot down, you had to look at what parts of the planes in the hangars had NOT been hit.
Simple, right? But not easy. As humans, we jump to conclusions and then get stuck there. It happens all the time. We spend time thinking about making our solutions better, when a lot of the time it makes more sense to look at the PROBLEM again and come up with a unique solution.
Anyway, that’s not the direction I wanted to head today. The direction I wanted to go is about “seeing” what you’re not bringing with you to class. “Seeing” what you’re not bringing with you on exam day or to your days on clinicals.
That’s what I want to show you in the August issue of Physician Assistant Exam Scholars. I want to show you what’s missing; once you see it, you’ll be able to add incredibly to both your test scores and your clinical experiences. I can’t wait to show you.
Physician Assistant Exam Scholars
Brain Wallace
