the margin of failure is “irrelevant”
Konstantinos Konstantinidis, M.D., Ph.D.
Director - ExCtu - addressing the Health Tourism Sector "Builder Class" (a.k.a. the "growth makers" and “developers”) by providing the infrastructure supporting economic activity and enabling the system to function
…the outcome is what matters
I was motivated to write this article, on reading the excuses made, for failing to achieve stated objectives.
For example, as part of the ExCtu Health Tourism Watch agenda, I have, on a number of occasions, come across the phrase or statement "we practically managed to achieve our objective" – intimating “success” - but meaning:
Those who make similar statements or declarations, expect to be commended for their effort at getting “very close”.
All this brought to mind a challenge posed by one of my teachers at junior school, who asked us to complete the phrase: “a miss is as good as….”.
No pupil answered correctly – simply because none of us had heard the idiom “a miss is as good as a mile”.
The point I want to make in this article is that regardless of how narrow the miss is, it's still a miss.
In other words, failing by a small amount is no different than failing by a large amount - you didn't achieve what you set out to do.
The outcome is what matters, not how close you were to success.
A small miss or a large miss, both result in failure.
This idiom emphasizes the binary nature of success and failure.