Bringing up Mary Poppins reminds me of this video about how they had special effects that nobody before or since has matched. (Until just a few months ago.)
Skipping past that, one of the things that caused me to mellow out was that reality confronted me with the knowledge that I personally have the same faulty wiring as those I had been dismissing. The work that I’ve put in to be more trustworthy is worthwhile. But my best is still fallible. And doubling down on trying to be perfect does more to block my later improvement than it does to improve the result of my reasoning.
Worse yet, there is nothing random about where my fallibility surfaces. It surfaces exactly where I care the most about getting things right. Exactly because the thought of failing there is most painful. I talked about this a little bit before. And one of my coping strategies is to distance my identity from the need to come to the correct conclusions. Which, ironically, now makes it easier for me to actually be right!