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16. The No-Mistakes Theory

If you're wondering how quickly you should be operating your life the answer is simple: do anything at all as fast as you can without making any mistakes. From washing a dish to driving a car to stock market analysis to brain surgery should only take as much time as you need to do the job without making any mistakes.

Let's say you are doing some small, even minuscule, job like washing a dish and the dish slips just a bit in your hand. You don't drop it or break it or damage it in any way, it just slips. That's what I'm calling a mistake. That minor slipping mistake is a cue to you to slow down.

Let's say you are driving a car and you notice that you cut a turn too sharply or maybe you took it a little too fast. What you noticed was a mistake in driving. The mistake was a cue to you to slow down and indeed, the act of noticing itself was a direct cue to you to slow down.

This analysis I just made is hardly earth shaking and actually echoes what has been told me (and probably you too) all my life. In one form or another I've been told to slow down since I was very small: 'Take it easy' and 'stop rushing' and 'don't be in such a hurry' and later on, 'stop and smell the roses' and 'what's the big hurry?' etc., etc. I actually have a framed exhortation (written in beautiful Arabic) that translates into, "Patience Is the Key to Happiness". I never realized the significance of that advice because I never was given a criterion of slowness, i.e., how slow should I go? So I never consciously tried it and I should have because now I know going slower can make anyone a much happier person.

Try this on yourself: slow down until you aren't making any mistakes (you are now fully focused on whatever you are doing} and then just step back for a minute and observe what happened. What happened is that everything magically improved. And I mean everything, including you, became better.

Why should you slow down in the first place? What's the big deal about slowing down? Don't mistakes always happen? "To err is human", right? Well, actually no and, technically speaking, if you were to go slowly enough you would never make any mistakes.

The slow-down cue, my friends, is actually being offered to you from Heaven. Don't jump back in scorn, just accept the idea for a minute and you will see, with some minimal experimentation, the enormous practical utility shortly. (The logical groundwork for the existence of Heaven has been demonstrated elsewhere.) *

When you make a mistake the mistake itself forces you to slow down. If you don't notice the mistake the consequences of that mistake will eventually show the mistake to you. It may take seconds, minutes, days or lifetimes but eventually your mistakes will become apparent to you. Now don't be scared, breathe deeply and relax, everything is all right. The joy of living is not negated by your mistakes. It's just lessened a little bit if the mistakes are little ones or a lot if the mistakes are big ones. But never forget you are an immortal being, embedded in the beneficent Supreme Being, with lots of lives and lots of time to learn from your mistakes.

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