XLife Tolerance-transferred

Sometime I feel stressed about saying the exact right thing or doing the exact right thing. If I'm talking with someone or persuading someone and the conversation doesn't go the way that I wanted, I tend to look internally to see what I did wrong, leading with the belief that if I said and did the exact right things, it would've gone differently. Do you ever feel that way too?

I see a lot of other people stressing about it too. Micro-managers who worry their teams will perform poorly, coaches who get frustrated when they can't make their team's win, employees who spend way too long at a job they hate, product developers who over-analyze projects to death.

It's clear how this mindset can steal from your life, when you constantly spend valuable brain space  looking for ways where you went wrong. It's equivalent to running a marathon with your shoes tied- it's slow, you trip over yourself and ultimately, it's your own fault.

So I'm here to provide some practical encouragement to myself and to you in math terms :)

Big Idea- Life is much more tolerant than you believe.

If you've ever done statistics, you're probably familiar with the concept of tolerance in a statistical way. It's the level or result a test needs to reach to be accepted as a fact. So many of us have a belief that life's tolerance is super high and every moment matters, like it was a test; and to get the results you want, you have to work hard to prove you were right..

So much is wrong with it. For starters, you can't force the truth. It's exhausting and futile. Plus, even if you were to succeed, you would end up with a lie.

This is a progression we're seeing in software today as well. As we shift away from static tables and logic to the more dynamic artificial intelligence. In the past, your software had to have all the right inputs to create the right outputs. Artificial intelligence, instead says- give me whatever inputs you have and I'll give you the best output.

This is something we can carry into our lives. We will never have enough information to make the perfect decision. There is a time and place for reflection, but it is not every time and every place. Progress is made by making the best decision with the information we have. If you're constantly finding yourself making the wrong decision, then take the time to reflect, find out what you need to learn to correct your decision making and move forward again.