My Pispective on Making (Stuff) Up

(A pispective is when you write about something using only 314 words)

'Stick to your knitting'. Basically it means stay close to what you know. The opposite to this is to 'make sh*t up'. In some professions taking the 'MSU approach is well accepted. The two form a continuum that describes our career experiences.

Some things doesn't seem to change much. Gravity. Snow is cold. Water is wet. Though that's not the case once you start feeling your way into quantum physics. That's when certainty starts to go out of the window. Our physics explains about 4% of everything and the smartest person knows only a tiny fraction of that 4%.

It's like the butterfly and sequoia tree story. We ask a butterfly if the sequoia tree is alive. The butterfly says "of course not, I've been here my whole life and it hasn't done a thing".

When we turn our attention to the human world, this issue of us not knowing much in an environment of constant flux becomes more discernible. One of the great advances of the last half century or so is debunking the idea that the laws that rule us are divine in origin. (Well, for most of us anyway).

We make the laws by which we govern ourselves. And a certainty about what we make is that it'll become obsolete after a while. Which hopefully most people can agree with. But, for instance, when it comes to government we behave as if its current form is permanent. Eternal as it were. Yet, all human institutions fail and are replaced with something more appropriate.

So it goes with how we approach our work. If we just stick to our knitting we will, at some point, be in for a nasty shock. I don't believing making sh*t up for everything. But if we don't start taking a MSU approach with a lot of what we do, then we're just butterflies on a sequoia.

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