An ordinary mistake is one that leads to a dead end, while a profound mistake is one that leads to progress. Anyone can make an ordinary mistake, but it takes a genius to make a profound mistake.
Interpretation
Profound mistakes can lead to growth and learning, unlike ordinary mistakes that offer no value.
This quote emphasizes the value of learning from mistakes, differentiating between common errors that result in stagnation and profound mistakes that spur personal or intellectual advancement. Wilczek suggests that while everyone makes ordinary mistakes, recognizing and embracing profound mistakes showcases true intelligence and creativity, as they often pave the way to innovation and growth.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing failure as a pathway to success.
In physics, your solution should convince a reasonable person. In math, you have to convince a person who's trying to make trouble. Ultimately, in physics, you're hoping to convince Nature. And I've found Nature to be pretty reasonable.
If you don't make mistakes, you're not working on hard enough problems. And that's a big mistake.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Think of your career as your ministry. Make your work an expression of love, in service to mankind. Within the worldly illusion, we all have different jobs. Some of us are artists, some of us are business people, some of us are scientists. But in the real world that lies beyond all this, we all have the same job: to minister to human hearts.
To be credible we must be truthful.
So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.
The workman mindful of success, therefore, will naturally direct his attention to the faultless preparation of his stock, and in order to achieve this result, he will find it necessary not merely to make use of the freshest and finest goods, but also to exercise the most scrupulous care in their preparation, for, in cooking, care is half the battle.
We had yet to learn that the Devil created youth so that we could make our mistakes, and that God established maturity and old age so that we could pay for them.
We are not asked to SEE," said Amy. "Why need we when we KNOW?" We know--not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. "It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is 'hard to trust' when things are entirely bewildering?
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