Darn Near Perfect—And Missing the Point
Aiming too well.
For most of my life, I’ve been trying hard to “improve” myself. This has not been a casual thing. I put more persistence, real effort, and thought into the process than I have into anything else in my life. I truly believe that making myself into a “better” person will make my life the best it can be. You’d think that by age 73, I’d be close to perfection—danger close.
I have always put my hardest work into improving at my profession. I took every class that the various companies I worked for offered. IBM, AT&T, and Siemens offered hundreds of classes. I was a professional and expert in my job. Marriage, raising kids, community, friends, and family were important, but it never occurred to me that I needed any improvement. After all, my “job” in life is to be the provider and breadwinner.
For decades, my North Star has been continuous learning and improvement with the ultimate goal of being a “better” person.
There are problems with that approach. First, it neglects to define what “better” means.
Imagine shooting at a target, and as you learn, your shots land closer and closer to the mark. That’s generally a good thing, but if the target you’ve been shooting at is the wrong one, just a little way off to one side or the other, the more you hit the wrong target, the less you hit the real one.
During my time in boot camp, while undergoing rifle training, I once scored 110 points at the 500-yard mark. That’s not unusual, even though 100 points at that range is the theoretical maximum. My instructor explained it to me. “The recruit next to you just loves you so much he gave you ten points and took ten away from himself.” In other words, I benefited from another guy who shot the wrong target.
I may have been aiming at the wrong target for a long time, occasionally hitting the right target by accident.
Last week, I stumbled across a word I thought I knew: Ubuntu. In my mind, it was just a Linux distro I never used. But this time, it meant something very different — and unexpected…
This time, it was used in a different context, so being a geek, I opened my browser and asked Perplexity what Ubuntu was. Here’s a part of the answer: “The core idea remains consistent: ‘You become a human through community and collective responsibility.’ Your relationships with others define your identity and humanity.
In other words, what’s important isn’t the individual, no matter how capable. It’s both the individual and the whole community, and how the individuals in it relate to each other.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” - African proverb
For a simple thought experiment, try to imagine all of the steps that go into making a simple modern pencil from scratch. You need wood, graphite, clay, metal ores, polymers (or at least gum from a rubber tree). You also need the tools to cut the wood, extract and process the ores, process the graphite, and vulcanize the rubber. But before you can make tools, you must master fire, metalsmithing, carpentry, etc.
No single person in today’s world could make a No. 2 pencil from scratch. That should have told me something about my relative importance in the grand scheme of things.
Without the hive, the bee is nothing. Without the bee, there is no hive. - Anonymous
There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve myself. It’s an admirable thing from almost any perspective. It misses the mark by just a little because it neglects other things, such as the relationships that make life meaningful.
No, I’m not turning into a communist or a socialist in my old age. I’m just realizing that I’d have aimed better if I aimed for a point somewhere between improving myself and improving my relationships and community.
In an interconnected network, the relationships are the most important thing. Everything influences everything else in the network.
Sometimes when people casually ask, “How are you?”, my stock answer is “Darn near perfect.” This usually gets a smile or a bit of surprise, and sometimes I leave it at that. When I’m feeling particularly excellent, after a short pause, I’ll add “I’m here with you and that’s darn near perfect”. That line is guaranteed to merit a big smile and make most of my day better. Why, because it takes a bold, confident brag and completely turns into a nice compliment for the other person. The surprise and genuine happiness I’ve seen when I use it convinces me that my aim is much better on the second shot.
So, instead of my trusty M-14 at 500 yards, I think I’ll be switching to more of a scattergun approach at much closer range.
I’m not giving up on self-improvement — just improving my aim.
That’s My Perspective!