11. the 90/10 rule
It took a few years out of school for me to realize that even though tests were graded out of 100%, the secret to life laid in the margins of error. That no matter how full proof you think things are there is always a 10% probability of chaos.
I spent a lot of my childhood learning what was right and good. I spent a lot of my adolscence trying to not be wrong or bad. As an adult, I learned that being perfect was a miconception of the less informed. Perfection implies the absence of error, of failure. Perfection means 100% one hundred perecent of the time. It’s not that it’s unachievable, it’s that you’d have to be a fool to try and achieve it. We aim as high as we can but scientists and physicsts know that with every test performed there is a probability of error. It’s why they run things thousands of times. It’s why the commit their lives to finding the errors in equations before they execute their ideas. And even then, they are always aware that there is a chance of error.
Now, most of us don’t have the time or dedication of scientists and physicsts, that’s okay. But it would be wise to apply the thinking in our own lives. Perfection is not something to be achieved, it’s something to aim for. It’s ambition, it’s belief but it’s not reality. The reality is everything can only ever be 90/10. And 99/1 if we’re lucky.
The belief is the relief. Life gets easier when you know something might go wrong because something must go wrong. No one makes it to perfection. No one needs to. We are perfectly fine at 90%. We are going to have bad days. We are going to fuck up. We are going to wish we kept our mouths shut and we are going to regret the times we didn’t say enough. Those are the margins of error we’ve accounted for when we began learning this lesson and embarking on this journey.
Life is about living.
No one said you had to be perfect at it.