5% of things go wrong

Of the things you do in life, 5% are guaranteed to go wrong.

I don’t know if it’s 5%. Maybe more, maybe less. But some percentage of things will go wrong.

Sometimes you step out of the house and slip on a patch of ice and rip your pants.

Sometimes you clip a car on the way to work and scrape the paint.

Sometimes your friends are late to an important thing you bought the tickets for.

Sometime your significant other forgets the obvious important thing.

There’s no way of knowing what will go wrong, but we do know that some things will go wrong. It’s part of the implicit contract that you agree to when you do things.

There’s a solution here if you don’t like the idea of things going wrong: don’t do anything. Don’t leave the house. Don’t drive. And for heaven’s sake, don’t have interactions with other people.

But that doesn’t sound appealing, does it? Understandable.

Instead, understand that this is the tradeoff that comes with doing anything. A certain percentage of things — hopefully not the important things, but sometimes the important things — will go wrong in some way.

If you want to go outside and do things in life, there’s no alternative.

But this whole idea helps me be okay with things going wrong.