Chicken Soup for the Shirt

So I was reading this book by Robert Dilts called 'Slight of Mouth' and in it there was a section talking about what difference is between things that we imagine and things that are real, so he had this exercise that he asked the reader to do, which I think is a really good exercise.

1) Remember something that you did yesterday (it shouldn't be anything cosmic, or very unusual, but it should be something that you actually did).

2) Imagine something you could have done yesterday (again, this doesn't have to be anything unusual or weird, it's better if it's just an ordinary thing that you could have done, but didn't).

3) Look at both of these things, as you look at them, as you see them in your mind's eye, how do you feel about them? What's the difference between them?

I've tried this exercise now several times in training courses. I've got lots of different answers, all of which are very interesting.

"I could have gone home and watched the telly but I took advantage of being on this course to stay with a friend and stay up all night drinking."

"I could have done a whole bunch of things that I would like to have done, but instead, I did the things that I absolutely had to do."

In my own case when I tried the experiment I considered the momentous issue of what I'd had on the previous day for lunch. The thing that I'd considered having was a bacon sandwich, but the thing that I'd actually had was a tin of chicken soup. And so I sat there trying to think what was the difference between these two things - an idea and a reality. How did I know that the lunch of chicken soup was real and the lunch of a bacon sandwich was just a dream? And then it struck me! I knew the chicken soup was real because I'd spilt it on my shirt!

And to me this was a big revelation. Engaging with reality means experiencing stuff going wrong. When stuff starts going wrong, that's one way of knowing it's really happening. Of course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't always be trying to get things to go right. What it does mean is that you should treat evidence of things going wrong as feedback, to be literally fed back into the process. As Kent Beck says:

'The disease of software development is optimism, feedback is the cure.'

What it definitely doesn't mean is that you should treat stuff goimg wrong as a reason to stop trying to do things differently, as an excuse to go back to doing things the way you always did them.
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