You get a couple of laps around the sun and then you’re dust. When you move, move with intention. There’s benefit in stillness, and movement should buy you joy.

If you recognize that watching someone 24/7 is neither a good way to build trust nor a good way to efficiently manage someone, then make sure that you understand the same principle applies to directing all 168 hours of their week.

“Zero Mistakes” is not a realistic target.

Let’s imagine that you’re a heart surgeon. You have a literal life-or-death job. While obviously you should endeavor to never lose a patient, it’s not only unrealistic to expect that outcome, it’s bad practice to make it an institutional goal.

Sounds crazy, irresponsible, or even offensive? Let’s look closer. The hospital director tells you, the heart surgeon, that even one lost patient is unacceptable. They think that if they say “it’s okay to lose 5-8 patients per year,” then they might as well be signing a death warrant, like they’re giving you permission to screw up – and you’ll definitely do it! So they say that if you lose even one, you’re fired. That way, you’ll absolutely be motivated to make zero mistakes!

What happens in practice? In practice, you only ever agree to perform the safest, lowest-risk surgeries. The more routine ones with no comorbidities. You lose zero patients, but dozens die because they never get surgery at all. Of those dozens, some might have died even if you operated on them, but many of them could have been saved. Since your goal was zero deaths, however, you didn’t take the risk. More people died, but none of them were on you.

The reality is that some risk is necessary in order to do good. Yes, you should be careful with how you assess risk, especially if you’re a heart surgeon. But the answer isn’t to minimize your risk, it’s to seek the optimal level of risk versus progress. And you simply can’t do that with a personal or institutional goal of zero mistakes.

Another problem: If the heart surgeon gets fired after one mistake, imagine a totally random fluke early in the year. A patient having a safe, routine surgery has a random event unrelated to that surgery and dies. Now the heart surgeon gets fired, and even the routine surgeries don’t get performed! As soon as one mistake gets made, in other words, the whole project is scrapped.

On an institutional level, “zero mistake” policies leave no room to correct course. They never have a plan for what to do about mistakes, because mistakes are “illegal” in the first place. So instead of training their surgeon on what to do if a minor mistake happens, they just say “don’t make any.”

Especially in an environment that’s not life-or-death (like 99% of all situations), you should actively be targeting a few mistakes. That lets you know that you’re taking appropriate risks, growing out of your comfort zone, and stretching your effort to its furthest reaches.

The only thing you should have zero of is zero mistake policies.

If you set a goal, lay out a plan, and then accomplish the goal, you’ve done something else, too. Something probably more significant than the goal itself.

You’ve created a method. Evidence for your expertise. You can call your shot.

Don’t underestimate that kind of power.

A difficult fact of life is that experiencing something doesn’t make you an expert on it. Even experiencing it a lot – even experiencing it more than someone who is, in fact, an expert.

Getting shot doesn’t make you a ballistics expert.

When we suffer, we look for all sorts of ways to justify that suffering. Nobody likes feeling victimized. Nobody likes feeling like they’ve wasted their time, either. So if you get mugged, it’s perfectly natural for your mind to want to create some positive as a result, and often that positive looks something like your brain saying “Well hey, at least I’m now an expert on crime, street smart and savvy. Won’t happen again, and I can tell others how to avoid it, too.” And if you spend ten years doing something that you didn’t like doing, like a job you hated, you at least want to be able to say that you’re good at it!

Experience isn’t nothing, of course. You learn something from everything you do. But it’s only one way to learn, and it’s not always the best way, and not everything you learn from experience is even correct. But again, that’s a hard pill to swallow. If you get mugged, and in response you form certain very strong views on crime, and then someone tries to tell you that not only did you get mugged, but as a result you became more wrong about how, why, and where crime happens than you were before? You feel victimized all over again. Most brains will do a lot to not feel that way, including being very stubborn about what they think they know.

When something bad happens to you, there’s definitely opportunity for growth. I truly do view every experience as such an opportunity! But you have to be very deliberate about what you learn. Don’t let it become a door for new biases to enter through. Instead, let it be fertile soil for your emotional growth.

And whenever someone voices an opinion to you that is clearly based on their own traumatic event, be graceful – and don’t expect any good results from trying to change their mind.

I try not to interfere with anything I can’t truly take responsibility for. In other words, I keep my nose out of other people’s business. If someone asks for my help, I’m more than happy to give it! But otherwise, that’s a good general rule: don’t touch things you can hold securely.

Three years today since my father died.

It hurts like it was yesterday. And I’m glad of it – I would rather hurt every day than ever forget a second.

It doesn’t have to be “vent and feel bad about this” or “find a solution and move forward.” You’re allowed to do both! In fact, sometimes safely venting to a friend will help you get to a solution. So don’t be too hard on yourself. If you can whistle while you work, it’s okay to gripe sometimes, too.

Don’t confuse “current status” with “permanent feature.”

There is a series of “status steps” that are often necessary to change a particular status, and the flow is usually this:

“Unpleasant Status” -> “Unpleasant Status + Additional Discomfort” -> “Pleasant Status + Residual Discomfort” -> “Pleasant Status.”

Consider the unpleasant status, for example, of being cold. In order to go from being cold to the (presumably) desired status of being warm, you first have to be cold and inconvenienced by looking for warmer clothes, shelter, etc. In a very strict, very short-term sense, you’re worse off now than a few seconds ago! Before you were only cold; now you’re cold and you have to do something. But soon that task yields results – you get your jacket or you go indoors or whatever. Then there’s a stage where you’re warm but you have to deal with the residual effects of whatever task you took to get there – did you have to buy the jacket? But soon that’s resolved, and now you’re just warm.

Simple enough when you lay it out like that. But the pattern is easy; the steps sometimes are more complex. And that pattern has enough steps that some people start to see a particular “unpleasant status” as a permanent feature of their life. An iron-clad caste instead of something that can shift, like being cold or being wet.

For example, if you’re in bad shape, that’s not permanent. “Overweight” isn’t a species. But if you want to not be overweight, the next step is “overweight, tired, and hungry,” and if you’re a short-term thinker, that certainly feels like being worse off! It’s especially unappealing if you’ve fooled yourself into thinking that “overweight” is something you can’t change anyway. Why be tired and hungry if it won’t change anything, right?

Not every status will be worth changing for every person. Actions have costs, and a fact of life is that you can’t do everything. My goals are not your goals, and that’s okay. But don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking you can’t have goals at all, because your life is carved from stone.

It’s not. You can warm up or dry off or anything you like.

Very recently, I had someone tell me that I’m someone who “always thinks I’m right.” I take this seriously!

It’s a hard accusation to argue with, of course. You’re kind of in a box as soon as someone levies that one at you. But that should give anyone pause – I mean, if you’re the kind of person who would argue against that accusation even in the face of the utter ridiculousness of doing so, then maybe the claim has a lot of merit!

But even more broadly, I seriously consider any aspersions on my character. Suppose I take it as a given that I’d prefer people generally to not have opinions of me like that. In that case, I have to grapple with the fact that one of two things is true: Either the opinion itself is warranted, or I’ve done something to make them think the opinion is justified, and either is cause to examine my behavior.

So, what sorts of things might make someone view me this way? This is someone who interacts with me pretty regularly, though usually only in a few contexts. So their opinion isn’t based, presumably, on one interaction. I tend to think of myself as someone who regularly re-examines his beliefs, updates his priors, considers sound arguments, and generally tries to stay humble about the state of his own knowledge. I certainly write about those things frequently here! Humorously enough, in the same week as I received the comment that inspired this post, a different person equally close to me paid me a compliment directly to that effect. So I’m somehow showing different aspects of myself to these people!

It could be in the way I talk about different topics. There are certain topics or areas of expertise where I’ve done considerably more research, reflection, and experimentation than others. In those areas, I may be more prone to state my views more strongly. Of course I’m more likely to think I’m right in areas where I have substantial knowledge, but I’d also like to convey that I’m open to new information even in those areas.

Some of it may be that I tend not to voice any opinions at all in cases where I’m not very certain. Since you can’t directly observe when I hold my tongue, it can make it seem like I “think I’m right about everything,” when in fact I just only speak up when I do think I’m right. Then again, this is a good area to reflect on – you should have more reason to speak than just thinking you’re right! If what you’re about to say isn’t helpful, entertaining, or rapport-building, then being “correct” hardly gets you closer to a happy life.

Another aspect to consider: The person who told me that I think I’m always right is also someone whose intelligence and emotional maturity I respect, so I don’t tend to walk on eggshells with them. Frequently I’ll hold my tongue with people simply because I see almost no reason to argue with virtually anyone. If someone has shown me a great deal of character in this regard, however, I can be more likely to simply voice opinions to them – they become someone who I consider part of the great crucible in which I test my own thoughts. In order to test thoughts and views, they need to be presented strongly – if their weakest, most hedged version can be countered, that doesn’t necessarily refute the underlying idea. But if I present the strongest case for a view or opinion to a smart and reasonable person and they can counter it, then that tells me the view is likely flawed.

A final thought – it may be that I simply don’t voice it enough when I do change my opinion. People convince me of new stuff all the time! Sometimes I write about it here, sometimes I simply incorporate this new information into my actions, sometimes I talk about it to others. But not enough, perhaps, do I tell the source directly: “You caused me to examine this belief and I’ve changed my view on it. Thank you!” (The person who paid me the opposite compliment is someone I have said that to, so that’s evidence for that!) So if nothing else, that’s a strong course of action for me to consider moving forward.

I wonder what I’ll be wrong about tomorrow?