Buffer

The margin for error is razor thin. We have no choice but to be perfect.

But do we really though?

Well today, we will continue to delve into the can of worms we opened with Shalini’s previous article, and discuss another facet of life that is getting lost in the modern age.

In the margin for error, lies all our room for maneuver.

– James Geary

The world today is faster, more volatile and striving for perfection than it has ever been. Everywhere we go there is an immense emphasis on speed, execution and excellence. And it is proving to be quite the strategy in most areas of the world.

There is so much stress on being so good, and hence there are many prevalent schools of thought promoting this being sold across the globe.

• “Be the best, or be forgotten.”
• Greatness only comes before hustle in the dictionary”
• “Hustle until your haters ask if you’re hiring”..

..and so on.

And I think this is great. I agree wholeheartedly that there is importance of hard work and hustle to improve the standards in our lives, as well as the broader society. Think about it, almost everyone who has reached a respectable stage in their lives came to it by a degree of hard work.

Our ancestors had different dimensions of their lives where they had to fight for survival. There must have been times where they would have been unsure where next month’s rent or even the next meal would come from.

Hustle enabled them to achieve a situation where they not only survived, but tried to set their next generations up for success. Resultantly, this generation has been doing quite well for themselves, as well as for the society in general.

We have more billion dollar funded startups. More world records in sports are being broken everyday. More people are achieving near perfect scores in every exam imaginable. The human race is truly going to a new level. And that too, while recording everything for the fellow humans to see.

Everyone today also has the capability to share their stories with a very large set of people across the globe. We have information overload in the context of the hustle most people are going through everyday. However, there is one downside to so much information.

It is very easy to misinterpret information when there is limited context surrounding it. And consequently, the hustle mentality has the potential of devolving into a “no-margin for error” mentality.

But the fact is

Leaving a buffer for mistakes is a splendid way to ensure a blissful life.

I’ll use an example to explain this. Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight, and you hired a personal trainer who is helping you along this process. The trainer “instructs” you to do the following things to accomplish your goal.

1. Eat 5 meals a day, every 2.5 hours.
2. Drink 4 litres of water everyday.
3. No junk food for the next 6 months
4. Sleep for more than 7.5 hours everyday

For one week, you went through everything like a good school boy and followed all the steps perfectly. Similarly, you went through the second week perfectly as well. Now, the third week came, and on Friday, you missed a meal, or you drank 2.9999 litres of water instead of 4.

Not only would this induce uneasiness, but would also make you feel deterred from the process. This uneasiness could lead you to relapse from the plan for the following couple of days, undoing the progress you might have made in your journey so far.

Had there been a margin for error in this scenario, you could easily fall back on that, and appeased yourself that this is part of the process, and all you need to do is continue to follow the routine as planned.

Now, in no way am I promoting mediocrity or lack of accountability by this article. There is definitely a place for maintaining a sense of responsibility around your life. However, we need to accept that mistakes are a part of the process, and they are bound to happen, irrespective of whether we like it or not.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂