We should aim for perfection -- and stop fearing failure | Jon Bowers
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2017
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
Sometimes trying your best isn't enough; when the situation demands it, you need to be perfect. For Jon Bowers, who runs a training facility for professional delivery drivers, the stakes are high -- 100 people in the US die every day in car accidents -- and it's perfection, or "a willingness to do what is difficult to achieve what is right," that he looks to achieve. He explains why we should all be equally diligent about striving toward perfection in everything we do, even if it means failing along the way.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features driving instructor John Bowers, recorded live at TED at UPS 2017. |
| 0:09.0 | Have you ever heard of typo squatting? Well, typo squatting is where companies like Google post advertisements on websites that are commonly miskeyed. |
| 0:18.0 | And then they sit back and rake in millions, banking on the fact that you're visiting something like Gmail.com |
| 0:24.0 | or microsoft.com. |
| 0:26.8 | Just seems kind of silly, doesn't it? |
| 0:30.4 | How about this? |
| 0:31.9 | On February 28, an engineer at Amazon made a similar, seemingly small key error. |
| 0:37.0 | Only I say seemingly small because this one little typo in Amazon's supercode |
| 0:41.3 | produced a massive internet slowdown that cost the company over $160 million |
| 0:45.3 | in the span of just four hours. |
| 0:48.3 | But this is actually really scary. |
| 0:51.3 | See, recently an employee at the New England compound, |
| 0:54.5 | which is a pharmaceutical manufacturer, |
| 0:56.7 | didn't clean a lab properly. |
| 0:58.5 | And now, 76 people have died and 700 more of contracted meningitis. |
| 1:03.7 | I mean, these examples are crazy, right? |
| 1:06.7 | When do we come to live in a world |
| 1:08.0 | where these type of typos, common errors, |
| 1:10.0 | this do-your-best attitude or just good enough, was acceptable? |
| 1:13.9 | At some point, we've stopped valuing perfection, |
| 1:17.5 | and now these are the type of results that we get. |
| 1:20.9 | You see, I think that we should all seek perfection all the time, |
... |
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