99.9 %

“We all need to learn 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, than even a 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 US Postal Service every hour
- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions each year
- 500 incorrect surgical operations every week 50 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?”

- from Scout Handbook for Leaders -