Occasionally, things I am reading converge. This may be happenstance, but it seems to deserve some special attention in any event. Today’s convergence is, I guess, the equivalent of a hat trick:
Aristotle – “It is the mark of an educated person to look for precision in each kind of inquiry just to the extent that the nature of the subject allows it.”
John Maynard Keynes – “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”
We strive for perfection yet we celebrate our sports heroes for being good enough, not perfect. A 0.300 batting average, a 90% free throw average. But in our neurosurgeons, however, a higher “batting average” is expected, particularly if it is me they are operating on. Unless one considers the Aristotle quote, how confusing this might be for a neurosurgeon who moonlights as a baseball player (okay, who plays beer league softball on Wednesday nights).
Which leads to the hat trick — this from Rachel Remen: “Once we stop demanding of ourselves that we be on course all the time we might begin to look at our mistakes differently…. They will not prevent us from reaching our dreams nearly so much as wanting to be right will.”
Stated another way, it occurs to me that notwithstanding wishes to the contrary, the “nature of the subject” of life doesn’t lend itself to being precisely right so much as “roughly right.” But I could be dead wrong about that.
It occurs to me... 