110%: Why High Standards Still Matter

Measure twice, cut once.

I learned that working with wood.

It sounds like advice about measuring.

It isn’t.

It is advice about consequences.

Before you cut an expensive piece of timber, you want to know the measurement is right.

Then you check it again.

Not because you lack confidence.

Because confidence cannot put the wood back together.

Once the blade passes through it, the truth is sitting there in front of you.

It fits.

Or it doesn’t.

There are no marks for effort.

No explanation changes the measurement.

No certificate makes the piece longer.

Reality has standards.

I sometimes wonder if we have become afraid of saying that.

Especially to our children.

We want them to succeed.

Of course we do.

We don’t want children growing up believing they are failures because they struggle with mathematics, cannot remember what they read or don’t learn in the same way as everybody else.

A child is infinitely more complicated than a percentage written on an examination paper.

Some children also begin life with advantages others simply do not have.

One child goes home to books, internet access, their own bedroom and parents who can help.

Another goes home hungry.

One has twenty children in a classroom.

Another has fifty.

One gets a tutor when they fall behind.

Another simply falls behind.

Then we put them in front of the same examination and call it equal.

It isn’t.

So I understand the instinct to make the system more forgiving.

I understand wanting more children to pass.

What worries me is what happens when compassion becomes confused with lowering expectations.

Because there are two ways to help someone over a wall.

Lower the wall.

Or help them become capable of climbing it.

Those things can produce the same pass rate.

They do not produce the same person.

South Africa is living with this question.

Our National Senior Certificate requirements are more complicated than the often repeated claim that matric has a simple 30 percent pass mark.

Still, some subjects can be passed at thirty percent, with other minimum requirements at forty percent.

Forget the politics for a moment.

Just sit with the idea.

Thirty percent.

Forty percent.

What are we actually telling a young person?

Not that they are stupid.

Certainly not that they are worthless.

A mark could never tell us that.

The question is whether we are telling them that knowing a small part of something is enough.

Because the world they are about to enter sends a very different message.

Imagine someone is about to operate on you.

Do you want them to know enough to pass?

Of course not.

You want the person who knows.

When an aircraft leaves the runway, nobody wants the pilot who understood most of the important parts.

When somebody wires your house, you don’t want approximately correct.

When someone designs a bridge, close enough suddenly sounds terrifying.

These are extreme examples.

That is why they reveal something.

The moment consequences become personal, our standards rise.

We want competence.

We want expertise.

We want certainty.

We want 110 percent.

Of course there is no such thing as 110 percent mathematically.

That’s why I like it.

It isn’t a mark.

It’s a way of approaching something.

Do everything you know to do.

Then ask what you missed.

Learn what you don’t know.

Check again.

Improve.

Return tomorrow knowing a little more than you knew yesterday.

There is a Japanese idea called kaizen.

Continuous improvement.

The beauty of it is that there is no finish line.

You improve something.

Then you look again.

There is always something else to understand.

Something to refine.

Something you could do better.

I think we have lost some of that thinking.

We have become obsessed with arriving.

Finish school.

Get the certificate.

Get the degree.

Get the job.

Get the promotion.

Become successful.

As if one day you are supposed to wake up and discover that you have finally become enough.

I don’t think that day exists.

Perhaps it shouldn’t.

There is something wonderful about being unfinished.

It means your greatest achievement may still be ahead of you.

Think about what one hundred percent on an examination actually means.

It doesn’t mean you know everything.

It means you correctly answered everything somebody decided to ask you that day.

There are still other questions.

Other books.

Other experiences.

Other people who know things you don’t.

Another hundred percent waiting beyond the first one.

That is 110 percent.

Not perfection.

Growth.

There is an important difference.

Perfection says you are never good enough.

Growth says you are never finished.

One diminishes you.

The other opens the future.

That is the idea I wish we gave more young people.

Not the pressure to be perfect.

Not the shame of getting something wrong.

Something far more useful.

Curiosity about what they could become.

A thirty percent result shouldn’t tell a child, “You are a failure.”

It should tell everyone around that child, “There is still seventy percent here that needs our attention.”

Teach it.

Find another way to explain it.

Find out why the child isn’t understanding.

Give the teacher what they need.

Give the school what it needs.

Ask more of parents.

Ask more of government.

Ask more of the learner too.

Keep going.

Because changing the meaning of success does not change what someone knows.

Reality eventually discovers the difference.

South Africa’s unemployment crisis has many causes.

Education is only one part of an enormously complicated problem.

Still, there is something difficult to ignore.

A certificate and a capability are not the same thing.

You can print the first.

The second has to be built.

Slowly.

Lesson by lesson.

Mistake by mistake.

Year after year.

Then one day the young person leaves school and discovers that the world rarely asks to

see the percentage anyway.

It asks different questions.

Can you solve this?

Can you fix this?

Can you communicate?

Can you think?

Can you learn?

Can I trust you with this?

Can you create something useful?

Can you do what you said you could do?

Those are difficult examinations.

There is no memorandum.

This is why simply raising school pass marks wouldn’t solve the problem either.

If we give children poor education and then demand eighty percent, we have achieved nothing.

We have merely made our failure their problem.

If the standard rises, the support must rise with it.

That is the difficult part.

It costs money.

It requires better teachers.

Better schools.

Earlier intervention.

More accountability.

More responsibility.

More effort from almost everybody.

Lowering expectations is cheaper.

Real compassion is expensive.

It asks us to give people what they need to become capable rather than simply telling them that what they already know is sufficient.

That is a much harder promise to keep.

There is an old Japanese approach to craftsmanship that I have always admired.

A master can spend a lifetime practising the same craft and still behave like a student.

Not because everything they made before was inadequate.

Because mastery reveals how much more there is to know.

Perhaps education should leave us with that feeling.

Not full.

Hungry.

Not insecure.

Curious.

Not ashamed of what we don’t know.

Excited that there is still something left to discover.

Maybe we have misunderstood what high standards are supposed to do.

A high standard does not have to say, “You aren’t good enough.”

It can say something far more powerful.

“I believe you are capable of more.”

That changes the conversation.

Especially for the child struggling at the bottom.

Do not tell them thirty percent is who they are.

Do not tell them forty percent is their ceiling.

Do not tell them the circumstances they were born into have decided what they are capable of becoming.

Give them more.

Teach them more.

Expect more.

Help them more.

Then ask again.

That is dignity.

Maybe the most dangerous thing we can do to another human being is decide too early that we have seen the best they will ever become.

We do it to children.

We do it to employees.

We do it to people who have failed.

We do it to ourselves.

We look backward at our greatest achievement and quietly begin protecting it.

Perhaps we should do the opposite.

Be proud of it.

Celebrate it.

Then leave it where it belongs.

Behind you.

Your greatest achievement should always have competition from the person you are becoming.

That doesn’t mean you need to conquer the world tomorrow.

Maybe tomorrow you understand one thing better.

Maybe you make one fewer mistake.

Maybe you read ten pages.

Maybe you ask the question you were embarrassed to ask.

Maybe you measure again.

Small improvements look insignificant until you give them years.

Then people call them mastery.

So yes, I believe in 110 percent.

Not because I expect anyone to be perfect.

I don’t.

I believe in it because one hundred percent can become a dangerous place if you decide it means you have arrived.

You haven’t.

Neither have I.

None of us have.

There is another question.

Another lesson.

Another mistake waiting to teach us something.

Another version of ourselves we haven’t met yet.

Maybe that is what education should really give a child.

Not permission to stop at thirty percent.

Not even permission to stop at one hundred.

The belief that there is always more.

More to learn.

More to understand.

More to give.

More to become.

The certificate will eventually end up in a drawer.

The marks will be forgotten.

Then life will put something important in front of you.

Something that needs building.

Something that needs fixing.

Something that cannot be almost right.

You will have what you learned.

You will have what you practised.

You will have the standards you learned to expect from yourself.

Then you make the cut.

Measure twice.

Cut once.

Give it 110 percent.

Then learn how to do it better next time.