"Low standards sound more like vice than virtue. I spent most of my working life trying to set the bar as high as possible. Aim high—even if you don’t reach the target, you’ll do more and better than you would if the target wasn’t there. The higher the bar, the better the performance. For many years, I lived by that principle, as do most of my friends in a wide range of professions. Twenty-first century Americans push ourselves, and we push hard. Only I can’t push anymore. The bar is no longer just out of reach; it’s on a different planet than the one where I live. Not so long ago, aiming high felt like a good motivational exercise, like an effective locker room pep talk. Now, it feels like telling a paralytic he can run around the block if only he’d try a little harder: the enterprise is at once cruel and pointless, and it motivates nothing more than despair. Maybe a better way to put the point is this: All my life, I’ve tried to do my best. Now, it seems that my best is gone; it doesn’t exist anymore. So I do what I can. I try not to aim at targets, and I try not to measure myself. Some days, I can’t read or write anything serious. Some days, I can. I do what I can, when I can. The bar has disappeared."
It was written by a man named William Stuntz, an eminent law professor at Harvard and an evanglical Christian. He writes a blog with a friend of mine named David Skeel, also a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Their blog is called Less than the Least.
William Stuntz has stage 4 cancer. It has forced him to think about the virtue of low standards:
There's more. Read the whole thing, here. There is surely no doubt that some things can only be learned through suffering.
JLM