What if we were all wrong all along? Why all of this everlasting obsession about always being right? How can we possibly claim we are always right and never wrong? Why do we have to feel that bad about being wrong altogether? Can we live a fruitful life outside rightness and still feel good about it? Well, apparently we can! And when several of your social networks keep talking about the very same TED Talk video on this very same subject, I guess you should stop for a minute and watch it, don’t you think? That’s what I did exactly earlier on today and why I thought you folks should, too! Have you seen Kathryn Schulz‘s Talk on the topic “On Being Wrong“? If you haven’t, I would strongly encourage you all to spend the next 18 minutes to enjoy one of the most thought-provoking, refreshing and liberating arguments against always thriving to being right, when perhaps we shouldn’t, as humane as we all feel we are…
Mind-blowing, don’t you think? After watching Kathryn’s TED Talk, I guess, from now onwards, I am going to start living more outside of that “bubble of rightness”; it looks like it is just a much more enticing learning experience altogether, specially, since it would help me avoid that series of unfortunate assumptions that she described beautifully and which I can certainly acknowledge having experienced one way or another and in multiple times:
- “The Ignorance Assumption
- The Idiocy Assumption
- The Evil Assumption“
I do realise it’s not going to be an easy task to do, since we have all been educated all along towards always being right, and never wrong, towards success versus failure (When was the last time someone told you to embrace failure, acknowledge it, learn from it, move on and try not to repeat it again, for the second or third time, for instance?), but then again, if we don’t do so, according to Kathryn, it will result in us losing our own humanity and becoming all too boring at the same time. I mean, can you imagine everyone being right about something? I guess we wouldn’t want to be like that, I suppose, but what do you reckon? Still think that being right is worth the effort of fighting with “the other side”? I am not so sure anymore after watching that Talk … Maybe we have been wrong all along and never noticed, because we all thought we had it right in the first place. Ha! Perhaps Augustine had it right all along: “Fallor ergo sum“.
Thanks for pointing to this one, Luis. Something that I found and liked was the idea that if I think you are wrong, maybe I just don’t understand enough about where you are coming from, and I should try to learn more about THAT than automatically assuming you are “wrong.” I often find it is my assumptions that are “wrong.”
Hi Jack! You are most welcome! Thanks for dropping by and for the feedback comments! Very nice observation, indeed! I felt pretty much the same way while going through, and surely has helped me make much more of a conscious effort to try to figure out first where people may be coming with those “wrong” perceptions, and see whether it’s me the one that’s actually wrong, or them, and understand why. Perhaps it’s no longer that black and white when stating whether someone is right or wrong. Kathryn’s TED Talk surely has made me think a lot about this very same topic in the last couple of days…
Thanks again for the feedback and speak soon! 🙂
On behalf of those of us that enjoy getting things wrong, I had wondered why everyone never likes being wrong.
The only way you get experience is to mess up the first time.
Few times in life have we ever done anything 100% correct the first time.