On Being Okay with Being Wrong
It’s a skill, and one I have only recently trained sufficiently. I take pride in knowing the things that I ‘know’, and that has been an impractical mindset under which to operate, especially as my goal formed around the acquisition of more knowledge. Like a lot of the behaviour I’ve written about here, it’s not one that I noticed, but it is one that I can immediately tell has been a hindrance as long as it has been around.
As far as I can remember, the only things I have been taught, at least by anyone in a position of power, is facts that have been realised by thousands of people millions of times over before it is told to me as something to simply accept. There are, of course, countless exceptions that prove the value of encouraging rote memory, but I don’t believe they invalidate my premise about how invaluable a tool good-intentioned disagreement can be. The most important things I’ve learned independently have all been fact-checked, often multiple times. I have written about how naïve I am in sourcing ideas, insofar as unless I have any qualms with the source or anything stands out in a big way, I will take on any idea as fact and gospel and will defend it as such. As such is the case, learning how to criticise those facts I believe, no matter how much faith I placed in them, turned out to be not only helpful but necessary in helping me navigate the simple act of thought exchange as an adult.
A major component of what held me back, I imagine, is the severe extent to which I hate being wrong in public. As soon as I began to see it less as a moment of weakness and more as an opportunity to learn, I realised how much I had been missing out on. I don’t want to overestimate the number of times I’ve restrained myself from contributing to a discussion for fear of saying something that wasn’t right, but enough examples come to mind for me to be glad that I’m not like that anymore. It is still a conscious decision I make – whether or not to contribute. But I still take pride in having reached the next step, and for the changes I made to get here.
It’s not only inward alterations that I’ve found helped me, but even things like simply changing my environment – and the people I’m around. Start off with those you trust not to make you feel bad, and then progress in stages, increasing the unfamiliarity of the group and the degree to which you are getting criticised. When I first started trying to do this, I was somewhat worried I would have to actively invent falsehoods to say in front of people to build up my tolerance, but it was pointed out to me on several occasions that my normal stream-of-consciousness and general talking points are themselves extremely fallible. It came as a bit of a surprise, sure, but was a symptom of the problem as a whole the more I thought about it. Or not. I might be wrong. But so what?