The joy of being wrong

…or, “The Thrill of Not Believing Everything You Think”

I have a pair of beige, stonewashed jeans that I love. A friend of mine once made the mistake of calling them gray, so I corrected her. A spirited disagreement ensued, and I enlisted the help of various passersby to prove my point. Curiously, they all agreed that the jeans were gray, not beige. How could this be? Clearly, I must ask more people until I get the answer I want…

“In life, it’s important to know when to stop arguing with people and simply let them be wrong.” – a good follow up to the above?? Not so sure that’s a good strategy though!

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
-Confucius

“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.”
-Seth Godin

“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
-William James

“Confidence come not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong.”
-Peter McIntyre

We tend to generalize about what little we do know. As we grow up, we encounter limits to how many facts we can memorize and how many individual skills we can acquire. We begin to utilize guidelines, rules of thumb, and conceptual frameworks to understand the world; and we group our myriad choices into right and wrong, practical and impractical, desirable and problematic, friend and foe, pleasurable and painful, and many other categories.
Unfortunately, our tendency to oversimplify and generalize in order to navigate the complexities of life also distorts our perceptions. Together with our various prejudices and predispositions, this natural inclination can cause us to exclude uncomfortable or contradictory information, discount people who disagree with us, and even marginalize entire segments of the population. When we do this, we often end up ignoring relevant information, rejecting sound advice, and ultimately making poor choices.

A key to dramatic growth is to recognize an amazing paradox: By accepting and actually embracing our limitations, we allow ourselves to open up the knowledge, experience, and insight of others and other things.

“Stop being afraid of what could go wrong, and start being excited of what could go right.”
-Tony Robbins

“I love being wrong because that means in that instant, I learned something new that day.”
-Unknown

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
-George Bernard Shaw

“To be creative, lose the fear of being wrong.”
-Unknown

“I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”
-Steve Jobs

“The greatest mistake a man can ever make is to be afraid of making one.”
-Elbert Hubbard

“It’s ok to be wrong, you learn from your wrongs. You don’t learn from being right. If you’re right, you already know it. If you’re wrong, it’s because you don’t know about it, and you made a mistake.”
-Unknown

“The secret to being wrong isn’t to avoid being wrong. The secret is being willing to be wrong! The secret is realizing that wrong isn’t fatal.”
-Seth Gordin

…and remember – open minded people embrace being wrong, are free of illusions, don’t mind what people think of them, and question everything, even themselves.