The Scout Oath starts like this, “On my honor I will do my best…” We all need to do our best all the time and in everything we do. Sometimes we think that just doing good enough is enough, and we justify ourselves by saying, “So I missed a couple of problems on the test but I still got a high score. Isn’t that good enough?” If you could have done better, then even 99.9 percent isn’t good enough. In fact, there are some things where anything short of 100 percent isn’t good enough. Consider the following statistics.

Even with a reliability of 99.9 percent we would still have:

• 1 hour of unsafe drinking water every month
• 2,000 unsafe airline landings per day, more than one a minute
• 16,000 lost pieces of mail by the U.S. Postal Service every hour
• 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions each year
• 500 incorrect surgical operations every week
• 20 newborn babies dropped at birth by doctors every day
• 22,000 checks deducted from the wrong bank accounts every hour
• 32,000 missed heartbeats per person per year

Would you be willing to risk your life and safety, or the life and safety of others just because 99.9 percent should be good enough?