101: Ninety Percent

The Need for Perfection

I started off this newsletter with the intent to write every day. Slowly, however, it turns out that writing every day with 100% success rate, on top of everything else that life throws at you, is not sustainable.

Over the past few days, I’ve missed at least 4 - 5 daily insights, largely due to travel, the vaccine, and work. This brings me to today’s insight.

90%.

In Interstellar, when Cooper asks TARS what was TARS’s honesty parameter, TARS said: “90%.” Upon further questioning, TARS revealed: “Absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic nor the safest form of communication with emotional beings.”

This is the whole point.

In some goals or endeavors, it’s useful to delineate whether a 90% achievement is “good enough”, simply because covering the remainder 10% will require a disproportionate effort.