Chopstork

Wherever you business types out there learned the slogan, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” with attribution to Einstein or Ben Franklin, please stop using it. It’s stupid. I heard it from an important person at work recently to motivate change in the company—hmm, how convenient. And sure is catchy. …Doesn’t seem quite true though, does it?

Well it’s not. First off, neither Einstein nor Franklin said it. No one knows who said it. Someone else did the research for me here. (Hey, teh internets is better than no source at all). The quote appears to be attributed to Franklin for the first time in 2004. Dead for 214 years and someone finally decided he was worth quoting? It’s attributed to Einstein in 1998, and to some football guy, a comic, another football guy, and an author before that.

Second, the statement just isn’t true. I don’t have a copy of DSM IV (psychology bible) to look up the medical definition (some would say the medical definition according to big pharma), or a law text book to look up the full legal definition, but you won’t find any sources that use the definition in question, except for people misquoting Einstein or Franklin.

So doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is not insanity. And vice versa is false. Someone else might have said it already, but doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results … isn’t that just practice?

There probably used to be tags for this post. Sorry, it\'s broken.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 5:04 am and is filed under Whatever, dorking out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.