Words to Live By

I’m copying and posting this here to remind myself, from time to time, of the message.

Well hey, here’s a valuable piece of information for you.

Most things, fairly universally, you’re wrong about. Yes, it’s true. Most of the things which you believe you’re right about – you are in fact wrong about. To some degree, either by having an incomplete picture of facts but believing you’ve got a complete one, or holding differing viewpoints and not being aware of it, or making a judgement on an incorrect assumption or even bad information you’ve received…

It’s just that most of the time the amount of your inaccuracy doesn’t matter. But accepting that fact is important because it allows room for you to accept errors in your thinking on important issues.

You’re not infallible, you’re not so great, you don’t know much. But that’s OK. Because none of us are infallible, none of us are that great, none of us know all that much.

But if you’re humble enough – you’ll keep learning. Slowly decreasing the margin of our error is all we can hope to do. If you believe you’ve fully closed it…that it’s reached 0, that you’ve finally got it all figured out and there is no more error…well then you’re just flying blind now. It may take a while, but you’ll eventually crash – as any pilot with closed eyes eventually does.

Bricka_Bracka via Reddit

 

Author: H Walker Jones, Esq

A professional programmer with a sordid past involving sysadmin, tech support, and cooking.

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