The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.
Piet Hein
The meaning of the quote
In 1917, during rest breaks from driving an ambulance on the Western Front, Lewis Fry Richardson tried to calculate the weather with nothing but pencil, paper and weather records from a single day in 1910.
It took him about 6 weeks to work out 6 hours of weather for 1 spot in Germany. And the answer was wrong. His sums said the air pressure there would jump by 145 hectopascals in 6 hours, a leap so big that real weather can’t make it.
He published it anyway.
In his 1922 book Weather Prediction by Numerical Process, he printed his method right next to his wrong answer. Decades later, a meteorologist reran Richardson’s sums after smoothing out the messy starting data, and the impossible jump dropped to 3 hectopascals, a normal value. His method had worked all along.
Forecasters kept running his method on computers and kept getting things wrong, a little less each time. In an article, NPR’s Planet Money reported that a 5-day forecast today is as accurate as a 1-day forecast was in 1980.
Your weather app still gets it wrong sometimes, just by less than it used to.
In the quote, Piet Hein gives you permission to get things wrong again and again, but he also gives you a job. Making the same mistake 100 times only builds a habit. Each try has to miss by a little less than the one before.
The first pancake in the pan usually comes out pale on one side and burnt on the other. You turn the heat down and pour a little less batter, and the second one looks better. By the fourth, it comes out golden. Nobody calls the first pancake a failure. It’s how you find out how hot the pan is.
A burnt pancake shows you what to change. A failed exam or a lost match doesn’t always, and you can read how Brandon Webb worked out what went wrong after losing his first company in Failure + Reflection + Another try.
Exercise:
Keep a mistake log
It’s easier to make fewer mistakes when you can see them written down.
- Pick 1 skill.
Choose something you’re practising right now, like a language or a sport. - Write 1 line after each try.
Note what went wrong. If the same mistake shows up again, add a tally mark next to it instead of a new line. - Fix the longest row first.
New lines mean you’re trying new things. A long row of tally marks means you keep making the same mistake, so that’s the one to work on next.
Err again tomorrow. Just make it a smaller one.
About the author
In April 1940, German troops occupied Denmark. Piet Hein, a 34-year-old Danish scientist and inventor, was president of the country’s Anti-Nazi Union. He could do nothing, flee to Sweden or join the resistance.
He joined the resistance.
He fought back with short, funny poems in the Danish newspaper Politiken, published under the pen name Kumbel Kumbell. He called them gruks, or grooks in English.
His first grook was about losing a glove. German censors saw a harmless rhyme and let it through. Danes saw a warning not to give up their self-respect by helping the Nazis, and they painted it on walls across the country.
In 1943, Hein had to flee to Sweden with his wife. He went on to write more than 7,000 grooks and kept inventing.
In 1959, Stockholm needed a roundabout for Sergels torg, a big rectangular square. The planners’ freehand circle didn’t fit. A true circle wasted space and an ellipse left too little room for traffic. Hein found a shape between an ellipse and a rectangle that fit, and he named it the superellipse.
In 1966, 44 years after Richardson published his wrong forecast, MIT Press brought out Hein’s first English collection, Grooks, where you can find this quote alongside 52 other short poems.
Resources
- Grooks (Book)
- Weather Prediction by Numerical Process (Book)
- Piet Hein (Website)
- Celebrating 100 years of scientific forecasting (Article)
- Failure + Reflection + Another try (Article)
- Fail again fail better (Article)
- Grook (Wikipedia)
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