Building Rome: Lesson One

Okay, before you read this at all, you should know this is ridiculous and simply comes from too much mental time on my hands to ponder such a random thing.

Sort of.

So I'm thinking, people say ridiculous things. It bugs me. Phrases. Things like, "Give 110%." That doesn't make sense. It is literally impossible to do better than you are physically able. It's like saying, see this gasoline. I'm going to give you 10 gallons, and you turn it into 11. Got that? Right. Impossible.

Rather than play dot-to-dot with all the annoying phrases that make no sense, I should focus on one that really just started bugging me.

"Rome wasn't built in a day."

Ok, so to just go over the facts, and to help you see my line of thinking, I know Rome was, actually, not built in a day. That is to say that the entirety of Rome was not built in a day, but then again, parts of it were, so there's already a discrepancy. This phrase is commonly used to help someone out with being patient while they are waiting to get something done or to see something accomplished. That got me to thinking. Of course, while the city wasn't built in a day, it certainly, most definitely, could have been built in a day, providing all the right equipment and a virtually limitless supply of slave labour (much of which they actually had).

My point is, the whole point of learning history (says just about every history person you will come across) is to learn from the mistakes of the past or to learn how to do things better than before. So what I'm saying is, if Rome wasn't built in a day, who cares? That in no way should affect my wanting to succeed at something in any sort of way. I want to do it better than Rome. Isn't that necessary?

Otherwise it seems to me that we're just meddling in thousands of years of historical excuses.