… Own them, learn from them, don’t repeat them

mis•take  noun  an action or judgment that is misguided or wrong.
 
“The only man [or woman] who never makes a mistake is the man [or woman] who never does anything.”
                                    – Theodore Roosevelt, 26^th President of the United States
 
 

It’s hard to believe, but after 18 years of formal study, from first grade in a small East Texas school through doctoral study at MIT, I cannot remember ever having a class or having a teacher talk about learning how to learn. Perhaps that’s why Coursera’s MOOC “Learning How to Learn” has been taken by more than 1.8 million students from some 200 countries.^{1, 2} It’s appears clear that my experience is not unique.
 

Today, most organizations, including a university’s IT organization, structure their work through a set of teams. Other examples include professional sports teams with their structure, their practice day-after-day of plays they may execute in the game, and a surgical team that performs the same procedure, for example, hip replacement, under tightly controlled conditions, perhaps multiple times, day after day.
 

… How do I respond?

Compliments are a good thing, right? Everyone likes to be recognized for a job well done. Especially from someone whose work you admire. They are a special form of positive feedback. However, many of us find accepting a compliment with grace to be a major challenge. Too often, our first instinct is to dismiss the compliment. For example, the recipient: