Ming’s Wisdom

Having a bad memory can sometimes be a blessing, especially when listening to music. I like to play music while driving, often putting a single song on “repeat-one”, so that the song plays again and again forever (when I’m in that mood, I’ll keep one song repeating for 20-40 minutes during a drive). The beauty of this setup is, when you’re done listening to an amazing song, you get to listen to it again. My memory is bad enough that when I listen to the song again, it feels like a whole new experience. And sometimes I might even forget that the song is on repeat, so I’m pleasantly surprised at the end of the song, that I get the luck to hear it all over again.

On a somewhat, but only marginally related note, life is beautiful, because it doesn’t give you the opportunity to fail. You really really aren’t talented enough to truly fail, because it would take an extraordinary effort to succeed at failing. How does that work? Because life is a continuously repeated cycle of 1-second time segments. You are only talented enough to fail for one or more time segments (some of you who are extra talented may be able to achieve failures lasting several multiples of 86,400 segments – multiples of a day). You may shout out that you’ve achieved failure, but a failure during one time segment inevitably is washed behind you into a past time segment when the next time segment takes its turn to be the present time. The failure is short-lived as it’s mandated to be attached to a time segment that slowly scoots to the back of the line, off into memories to be forgotten. The very next time segment that comes along is a new opportunity to succeed. The cool thing is, most things in life allow you to fail continuously for many time segments, and success is achieved as long as you achieve success for at least 1 time segment only (as long as you don’t seriously injure yourself in trying, that does follow you to the next time segment). If you take a bigger picture (bird’s eye view) of time, we can assign each hour of a day to be our time segments to be analyzed. There are 16 waking hours in this day, so 16 time segments. You may be able to achieve failure in one or more of your time segments, but after that failure life inevitably pushes another time segment onto you, forcing you to try again. Given a 1 in 2 chance of failure at a given goal, you have a 1/2 ^ 16 chance of continually failing. That’s 1 in 65 thousand. So you’d have to be extremely talented, be very persistent, and have extraordinary discipline to actually fail. Frankly, I don’t think anyone I know really has the patience and endurance to fail, so just go out and do it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 02:34 and is filed under Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.