“The truth is more important than the facts.”
– Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959), legendary architect
“You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.”
– Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936), English writer
“A mathematician is a device for turning coffee in to theorems.”
– Paul Erdos (1913 – 1996), Jewish-Hungarian Mathematician
So, an architect, a writer and a mathematician walk in to a…
OK, yes, I know that three quotes is over the top, even for me, but I’ve used “not everything that counts matters and not everything that matters counts” a couple times and I wanted to make the point a different way.
If we only focus on numbers we lose sight of the activities that matter – the things we do that ultimately produce our numbers. If we only focus on facts, we’ll never be sure of the truth. The fact was, until May 6, 1954 no one had ever run a mile in less than four minutes. The truth is, that after the 1950 Olympics, Roger Bannister set the goal to be the first. Truth, it turns out, was that it could be done, not just that it never had.
If we want the facts to change, we have to focus on the truth, and act with it as our compass. Because, while the facts point us toward the truth, the truth really does set us free.
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