The Importance of Being Wrong

I am a man who values education, health and spirituality. To me, these are the three cornerstones of a successful life. If you are not educating yourself, teaching yourself, learning something new each day about this beautiful world and the cultures that abound in it, you are at a serious disadvantage. If you are not healthy, eating foods that are good and valuable resources for your body, exercising your muscles, engaging in aerobic activities, you will be prone to depression, obesity, cancer, etc. Your spirituality, your own personal connection to God, a Higher Power if you will, is essential in allowing yourself to expand beyond your human capabilities.

Yet, the more I have learned and the further I can set my huge ego to the side, the more I realize that we as a human species, as homosapiens, have been wrong in regards to many things. Here's another important point: it is essential that we get things wrong! We are curious creatures by nature and therefore we rely on our logic, our collection of experiences, and most importantly and erroneously: we rely on our assumptions about how the world works and why people behave the way they do. It is a rare occasion the one takes responsibility for being "consciously aware" of his or her experiences. We arise from our beds each morning and go through our routines habitually, usually without much thought as to why we do them or whether or not the routines are good for us.

Most of us do everything we possibly can to avoid being wrong, or at the very least, to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. Sure, we get it in the abstract. We all realize and know that everyone in the world makes mistakes. The human species, as a whole, is fallible. "That's fine!" we think to ourselves. However, what it all boils down to right now, to all of the beliefs that we hold in the present, this abstract appreciation of making mistakes and human fallibility goes out the window and we render ourselves incapable of seeing anything that we could be wrong about.

In a sense, we all wind up traveling through life in this tiny, comfortable bubble of feeling right about everything. This is a problem, a huge problem. It is a problem for each of us as individuals in our private and professional lives and it extends further as a major problem for all of us collectively as a culture. The intent of this article is to talk about why we get stuck inside of this feeling of being right and why it is a problem. Most importantly, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling. If you can learn to do this, it will be the single, greatest moral, intellectual, creative and spiritual leap you can ever make.

Why is it that we get stuck in the mire of "being right?" One major reason has to do with the feeling of being wrong. How does it feel to be wrong? How does it feel emotionally? Think about the last time you were wrong. Many people have answered: embarrassing, humiliating, dreadful. These are all great answers but they are answers to a totally different question: How does it feel to "realize" you are wrong? It takes on a whole new meaning now does it not? Yes, it can be devastating, but it can also be revelatory and sometimes, quite funny. Just being wrong doesn't feel like anything.

There is a cat and mouse cartoon called "Tom and Jerry". Tom, the cat, is always trying to catch Jerry the mouse in a multitude of "ingenious" ways. In one of the episodes, Tom is furiously chasing Jerry across a terrain of land and onto a lake where Jerry quickly speeds away on a boat. Tom, however, is so caught up in the chase that he forgets to realize he doesn't have a boat and continues to run over the water. When he realizes his situation, he furiously scatters his legs in midair in an attempt to get back to land, only to plunge in the icy, cold waters below. This is a wonderful analogy to the way we think and approach the idea of being wrong. When we are wrong about something, not when we realize it, but before that, we are like the cat after he has gone from the land out onto the water before he takes a plunge. We are already wrong, we are already in trouble, but we feel like we are on solid ground. In a way, it does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.

There are several reasons why we get so stuck inside of this feeling of rightness. One is called error blindness where most of the time, we do not have any kind of internal cue that lets us know that we are wrong about something, that is, until it is too late. A second reason why we get stuck inside of this feeling is cultural. Think back for a moment to your elementary school days. You receive your spelling quiz papers and you notice all kinds of red X's and marks all over the words you spelled wrong. Maybe you were not the child who received the red marked paper. You learned quickly, however, that the child who received the F or the D or even the C or all of those red marks was the "troublemaker," the "dumb kid," the child who never does her homework. By the time you are around twelve, you have already learned, first of all, that people who get things wrong are lazy, irresponsible idiots, and secondly, that the way to succeed in life is to never make mistakes.

We quickly learn these bad lessons remarkably well. Most of us deal with these lessons by becoming "perfect" little A students, over achievers and perfectionists, some to the point of obsessive-compulsive behaviors. This is fine, right? It is fine until we freak out at the possibility that we have erred on our part and have gotten something wrong. According to this belief system, getting something wrong means that there is something wrong with us. So we just go along insisting that we are right, because is allows us to feel safe, smart, virtuous and responsible.

Thousands of medical doctors have malpractice suits filed against them because they erred. They trusted too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of their practice, which is very dangerous. This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide as to what is actually going on out there in the external world. When we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the notion that we could be wrong, that's when we end up doing stupid things. It is a huge social problem.

Think for just a moment about what it means to feel right. It means that you think that your beliefs perfectly reflect reality and when you feel that way, you have a problem to solve. The problem to solve is how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? As it turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of dubious, unfortunate assumptions. The first thing we do when someone disagrees with us is that we automatically assume that they are ignorant. They simply do not have the same access to the same information that we do, and when we "generously" share that information with them, they will "see the light" and join our team. When that does not work, when it turns out that those people have all of the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, we move on to a second assumption: they are idiots. They have all of the right pieces of the puzzle, but they are too stupid to put them together correctly. When this does not work, when it turns out that the people who disagree with us have all of the same information and facts that we do and are actually smart people, we proceed to a third assumption: they know the truth, but they are deliberately distorting for their own evil purposes. This is an utter catastrophe.

This attachment to our own sense of rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to make them and causes us to treat each other horribly. what is most baffling and the most tragic to me, is that it misses the whole point of being human. We want so badly to imagine that our minds are just these perfect, clear windows that we can gaze out from and explain the world as it unfolds. Further, we want everybody else to look out of the same window and see the exact same thing. This is simply not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring! The miracle of your mind is not that you can see the world as it is, it is the fact that you can see the world as it isn't. We all remember the past differently and we all look at the future with different expectations, and yes, we can attempt to place ourselves in another's shoes for a while. We all do it differently, which is why we can look up at a sunset and each see it differently. This is also why we get things wrong.

Our capacity to screw up is not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human being, it is not something we can eradicate or overcome. It is totally fundamental to who we are. Unlike God, we do not really know what is going on out there. And, unlike all of the other animal species on our planet, we are so obsessed with trying to figure it all out. This is a good thing! This obsession is the source, the root of all of our productivity and creativity.

Life is full of surprises, plot twists and red herrings.  Art truly imitates life as we see in movies and television and fictional books. We eat this stuff up! We love going to a movie where the plots turn at every corner. We love figuring out mysteries. Indeed, we are curious creatures. When it comes to our choice in stories, we love being wrong. Our stories, however, are like this because our lives reflect this. We think this one thing is going to happen and then something else happens instead. You thought that you were going to go from the high school football team right into the pro leagues and something else happened instead. You thought you were going to marry your childhood sweetheart and have 2.5 children and something else happened instead. I thought I was going to be a medical doctor of psychiatry and something else happened instead.

This is life; for good and for worse. We create these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world itself turns around and astonishes us. We have an incredible Caretaker; I call him/her God. God is very sure of His capacity to be Creator and Sustainer of the Universe and His Children (that would be you and I). As a parent, God allows us to care for ourselves and each other. Yes, we are children, but children have to grow up. We're all explorers and many of the people you have encountered in one way or another have overcome all kinds of adversity without the constant Divine intervention on God's part. I am in no way suggesting that God is aloof or indifferent. He is right there always, but He knows what we are capable of. God knows that it is the challenge of surviving on our own that helps us to evolve. If you are doubting yourself in any way, know this: you will do better than you think. You just have to keep trying, knowing that you are going to make mistakes.

To me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to have the courage to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other. Look out at the vastness and complexity and the mystery of this universe and be able to say, "Wow! I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong."