Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

The founder of eHarmony, Neil Clark Warren, wants to get into matching people with the perfect job or the perfect financial adviser or even the perfect friend. That may be good business, but you have to wonder whether this effort will work any better for recruiters and job seekers than it does for singles.23

Reverend Flowers had aced a psychometric test, the recruiters’ equivalent of an online dating profile.25

Will we ever realize that there are some parts of life that the algorithms cannot improve? Perhaps

Human. Real creativity, excitement, and humanity lie in the messy parts of life, not the tidy ones. And an appreciation of the virtues of mess in fulfilling our human potential is something we can encourage in our children from an early age—if we dare.