This is a somewhat roundabout answer to the question, “is it better to not make mistakes?”

To be more specific, it’s in regard to “getting it right” the first time, and is constrained to non-life-threatening domains. This is not a question cardiothoracic surgeons ought to be entertaining with a ticker on the table.

More on how this question came about later. For now, some foundations to set this table.

1. It’s easy to make someone’s day.
2. Predicting stuff is difficult and atrociously unreliable.
3. The universe is utterly indifferent to our existence.

How do you make someone’s day? Grand gestures are an option, but I’m guessing that wasn’t your initial thought. Instead, it was likely akin to flowers, an invite for coffee, or washing the dishes. And as Curiositry notes on the topic, “The effort required is approximately equivalent to taking out the trash. And as with taking out the trash, most of the effort is getting around to it.”^[1]

There’s an untapped well of kindness to be had in these small gestures. And, when combined with #2, that reliably knowing what will happen before it happens is slipperier than a Crisco-coated toboggan, it’s nigh impossible to fully chart the outcome of small and large gestures alike.

To start supporting this second claim, that predictions are sus, when was the last time any major “life thing” happened even vaguely the way you expected it to? Sure, maybe you went to college and you left with a degree. But the “stuff that life is made of” was not tidily laid out in the syllabus for you ahead of time.

For some less subjective evidence, here’s Charlie Bilello on the effectiveness of investing based off short-term predictions in his 2024, year-end review^[2]:

“The most bearish target came from JPMorgan, the biggest bank in the world with access to some of the smartest minds and more data and information than anyone else.

“What did they foresee? Lackluster earnings growth (2-3%), rising geopolitical risks, softening economic demand, and a price target of 4,200 with a ‘downside bias.’

“And what actually transpired?

“Earnings growth of 10%, stronger-than-expected economic growth, and a significant boost in investor optimism (17% multiple expansion).

“At the start of the year, who could have foreseen this combination of events?

“No one, which is precisely why you shouldn’t invest based on predictions.”

Finally, consider the worm, C. elegans, a nematode with a scant 302 neurons. To put that in scale: you, me, and even that aggravating twat that brought fifty items to a ten-item-max grocery checkout lane has billions.

And researchers, right now, on the bleeding edge of predictive animal models for these wriggly little guys are still not at the fully-deterministic stage^[3]. Translation: even for creatures with barely more neurons than we have bones, predicting their behavior is hard.

Pile on a few billion neurons, a few billion people, and the vast interconnectedness of society; all existing within the context of a tumultuous Mother Nature, and we’ve got one heck of a Rube Goldberg uncertainty machine.

And yet, in another way, none of that matters in the least. Not to the universe anyhow.

On a “all of time and space” scale, you, and me, and the rest of society are naught but fleeting blips. This simple notion is what is sometimes referred to as “cosmic insignificance therapy.” I first encountered the idea in Oliver Burkeman’s absolute banger of a book, Four Thousand Weeks. Its essence is what it says on the tin: the universe is utterly indifferent to us. To a galaxy, my life is as impactful as one of those worms.

This assertion initially feels profoundly debilitating. But as Burkeman argues, it is instead liberating. Shedding the ridiculous pretense that we ought to hold our individual selves to cosmic scales of relevance reminds us that our meaning is our own. We get to craft it.

“From this new perspective, it becomes possible to see that preparing nutritious meals for your children might matter as much as anything could ever matter, even if you won’t be winning any cooking awards; or that your novel’s worth writing if it moves or entertains a handful of your contemporaries, even though you know you’re no Tolstoy; or that virtually any career might be a worthwhile way to spend a working life if it makes things slightly better for those it serves.”^[4]

Okay, so we’ve got...several loose threads and a lot of doubt injected into this conversation? Check. Let’s stitch it up, and move toward the original, inciting question.

Steve Jobs and a barista: who contributed more to society?

This strikes as an intuitively obvious answer. Steve Jobs, dur. “Like...iPhone? You’re transcribing this from your fancy little paper notebook directly into an Apple device. Get with the program, dude.”

And yet.

How do you know that? How can you know that? I hope my unusually long-winded blabber has convinced you that we don’t and can’t.

Attempting to neatly flay apart the effects of one thing within a slew complex other things is a fool’s errand. Or science. But this particular question isn’t exactly a prime candidate for a randomized control trial.

When I think of a life well lived, of contribution, it’s not a tidy equation, or an “obvious” answer with the score kept by the number of big-budget biopics one has about them.

It’s in the small moments. The barista that just dealt with an obnoxious customer and, bafflingly, still has a warm and authentic smile for me.

This is the sort of thing that smushes the earlier #1 to 3 together for me: that in a cosmically-indifferent universe, it’s possible that the tiny kindness of a stranger might matter more than the grandiose actions littering the history books.

Thus, the blunt answer to the original question, whether it’s better to not make mistakes is:

“Who knows?”

This flippant response is not, to paraphrase John Adams, to allow “mystery be made a convenient cover for absurdity.”

But this is a fundamentally philosophical question; there is no simple “yes” or “no.” It’s philosophical, in part, because we can’t do the math yet, which is currently stuck on neuron 302 (and all but a perfect model is still just a prediction anyway).

To me, the takeaway to both of these questions, of mistakes and baristas, is about freeing ourselves from the constraints of our coagulated assumptions.

What utility is there in a definitive answer to either question? Is anyone’s life made better by being “certain” that Steve Jobs contributed more than the barista? Will knowing if “to mistake or not to mistake?” is better—will that avert any screw-ups?

Clearly, I’m suggesting that these questions are worth considering. This post exists. But I contend that it’s not worth dwelling on. Nor are the tiny mistakes that, unknowingly, sparked all of this.

Odelia, a writer I’ve keenly followed for some time^[5], in a post on her Substack, made one such tiny mistake. It was a minor attribution error about a poem she referenced. And through sheer coincidence, it happened to be from one of the few poets in my limited repertoire, so I noticed it and reached out.

And the winding output of that tiny mistake is twofold:

• A hopefully useful treatise on why we should discard the pretentious baggage we can’t do anything with, in favor of the flush-with-agency small kindnesses we can. AND!
• A fun, blind(!) collaboration with Odelia about this topic (we’re posting at the same time and don’t know each other’s answers!). Check her response out here, which I’m predicting will contrast somewhat with mine. 😉

Anywho, perhaps making someone’s day, or your next mistake, will bend the arc of the universe ever so slightly in a more useful direction.

I do so hope the universe is as kind about my next mishap.