In Touch - Ken Szalai

Dryden X-Press February 20, 1998

In touch with Center Director Ken Szalai

Time travel

• Take a moment to reflect on what you would have done differently in 1997.

Time travel has been an intriguing topic for ages. H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine” has a time explorer moving forward in time eons to a frightening world. Finney’s book, “Time and Again,” the film “Somewhere in Time,” and multiple editions of “Back to the Future” concocted both dramatic and comedic situations related to time travel. What if it were possible to go back no more than one year and relive one day in the way you wanted to? What would you have done differently?

After you have made investments in stocks that you knew went up, and sold investments you knew went down, then what? How good is your 20-20 hindsight? What things would you do differently in one 24-hour day in 1997 if you were given the chance?

To start you thinking, here are some considerations for the eight hours at work in your “return trip.”

•Updating all of your schedules to incorporate extra time to overcome the problems you know will occur;

• Using safety equipment the day of the injury;

•Restating a comment that angered someone, embarrassed you or triggered a bad reaction;

• Saying something to a person you cared for, when you had the chance;

• Paying attention to traffic just before the accident occurred;

• Driving at the speed limit the day you were ticketed;

•Replacing the leaky water heater the day before it flooded your home;

•Using a ladder instead of a chair the day of the fall.

Other than the get-rich schemes we might be able to contrive in a return trip to 1997, many of the “replays” could have been accomplished satisfactorily the first time around, if we were alert to the environment at the time.

Also, many of the missteps we make are done with a glaring disdain for history and the lessons it provides. One of the amazing abilities of people is to learn. Enormous amounts of money have been spent to develop artificial learning software like neural networks. Yet every person at Dryden already possesses this wonderful attribute.

I suggest that we each take an inventory of the wrong turns we took in 1997 in our technical, programmatic and interpersonal relationships, mentally update our memory banks with the lessons learned, and do better in 1998.

Happy New Year.

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