Another one is "the good is the enemy of the best".
Over the years, I've met a lot of people who, though they may have not 'known it all', certainly had a lot of insight and theories about steps they hadn't worked yet. Plenty bright, but they got so wrapped up in knowing how and why things worked that they never seemed to get around to working the twelve steps.
Theories are good; they give us conceptual models to understand things. But, scientists don't (well, at least aren't supposed to) get too attached to 'em. The idea is only as good as it works out to be - and is evaluated against the results of tests, and scrutinized by peers. It only has value if it works, and for as long as it continues to work.
Conceptual models for how we think things are can be bad for us addicts. We're a class of people who are characterized by not being able to see the forest for the trees, when it comes to ourselves. A group of people who stays stuck on one futile test (controlled use), with the hope that we'll eventually get the result we want, is not the group of people really qualified to objectively analyze their own ideas. Never mind inviting people to try to poke holes in their theories... nah, that's a recipe for a bad time.
In workshops, I was taught that even ideas that are good, and have worked well for us, can hold us back from an even better understanding. The hand that grasps something can't pick up something new. The good is the enemy of the best.
There's a prayer that I learned there; it's also often said at MA meetings. Rarely have I heard it anywhere other than MA or a workshop. It goes like this:
God,
please help me set aside
everything I think I know
about myself,
my disease,
these steps,
and especially you...
for a new experience
with myself,
my disease,
these steps,
and especially you.
-M
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