I once heard a motivational quote that goes something like this: "Hang your ideals as high as the sky, even if you fall, you will fall among the stars."

Honestly, this is the most logically and physically flawed advice I have ever heard. If you fall from the sky and hit a star, you will not become poetic, you will be incinerated by millions of degrees of plasma.

Many people have their lives ruined because they set their expectations (hopes) as a linear function that climbs endlessly without bounds. They want a perfect career, a flawless partner with zero defects, and an absolute 4.0 GPA. But in the real world, the law that applies is not the law of cheap motivation, but the law of Asymptotes.

In mathematics, an asymptote is a straight line that a curve approaches continuously, getting closer and closer, but even until doomsday, that curve will never actually touch the line.

Your expectations should be modeled as a curve that has a horizontal asymptote. You can set an upper bound (limit) of how ideal a condition is, and you can work hard to get close to that boundary. But you have to accept the mathematical fact that you will never touch the number one hundred percent perfect.

For example, you are looking for a partner. You have a long checklist: smart, good-looking, smells nice, understands IT, likes cats, and is not naggy. You search for someone who meets 100 percent of those criteria. But in reality, you might only find someone who meets 80 percent or 90 percent of your list. The remaining 10 percent are their flaws that you have to tolerate (error margin).

People who do not understand the concept of asymptotes will break up with this 90 percent person, just to look for a 100 percent one. And guess what happens? They will get trapped in an endless search (divergent), because a 100 percent human only exists in the imaginary plane, not the real plane.

The same goes for your job or coding project. If you wait for your code to be absolutely perfect with zero bugs before you dare to deploy it, your product will become obsolete and overtaken by competitors. The concept of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was born because engineers realize that 80 percent functionality is enough to release a product. The remaining 20 percent can be patched later.

Realizing the existence of asymptotes in life does not mean you give up or become pessimistic. It means you are being pragmatic. You know when you have to pull the brakes. You realize that the effort you put in to raise a score from 95 to 100 is way bigger, exponentially, than the effort from 0 to 80. The law of diminishing returns applies heavily here.

Instead of spending the rest of your energy chasing that impossible 5 percent perfection, you are better off using the energy for other things. Allocate your time to take a nap, play games, or just go for an aimless walk.

A happy life is not a life that touches the asymptote, but a life that realizes its position on the curve and knows how to enjoy the process of approaching it.

Khay