"I'm being realistic"

The third belief follows from the first two, and it's the one I'd most like to shift, because it's the one that feels like a virtue. You'd say you're realistic. Other people see a lovely evening. You see the evening as it is, with its faults in it.

Consider what a realistic report of the kitchen would contain. Table cleared and laid. Post sorted. School bag ready. Pan on the hob. Four items, one of them a fault. That's the realistic report. The report the scan gives is one item long. It's not more realistic than the four-item version. It's less. It's a report with three-quarters of the evening left out.

The same is true of the quarterly report. A realistic assessment is that it's forty-one pages of careful work with one wrong total. What you said was that the total is wrong. True, and a quarter of the truth. Your daughter's homework is eighteen right and two wrong, and what she heard was two wrong.

I think the word realistic has been doing a job it isn't fit for. It's been standing in for "willing to see faults", and those aren't the same. Someone who only sees faults is exactly as unrealistic as someone who only sees what's fine. They've each got half the picture. The difference is that the fault-only person feels rigorous, and the fine-only person feels naive, and neither feeling is evidence.

Look at the count from chapter 1, if you did it. Say the first column came to fifteen and the second to two. The question isn't whether the fifteen faults were real. They probably were. The question is whether the day contained fifteen faults and two fines, and you know it didn't. The day contained several hundred things that went as they should. Meals happened, people turned up, the work got done, the car started. Fifteen to two is a count of what rang, not of what happened.

If you want to be realistic, and I think you do, the job is to get the fine into the record. Not instead of the faults. Alongside them, at something closer to their true proportion. This will feel, for a while, like going soft. It isn't. It's correcting a count that was wrong.