Be Willing to Be Wrong: It’s the Right Thing to Do

This is a picture of a tree at a rest stop in Indiana. It represents growth, which comes through willingness to be shown you were wrong.

When I Was Wrong

A couple of days ago, by way of the unexpected twist of public speaking being a major portion of my job description, I was asked to speak for about five minutes during a presentation by my employer that was otherwise a concert.

The audience was outwardly homogeneous, although sufficiently diverse in ideology, age and education that it felt like a big ask to say something everyone would endorse. Anyway, my subject matter wasn't particularly revolutionary or original, and because everyone was actually there to listen to music, anyway, I decided to aim for reactions ranging from "Oh, that was a nice little talk," to "somebody spoke?"

When I Found Out I Was Wrong (and Made a Counter Claim)

Long story short, I think I accomplished my goal of comfortable and positive forgettabity for most folks. Unfortunately, one of my good friends in attendance felt very strongly--and told me so--that not only was I wrong about everything, but that in fact I was so wrong that I was also irresponsibly reinforcing ideas that were damaging to everyone.

When you're a giant heretic who never gives enough thought to anything, you get used to people bustling up brimming with the bad news after any time you make public comments, and you get a little blase to it. In this case, though, I take my friend a lot more seriously than I do most people who make it their post-speech business to stick knives in my Achilles heel, so I was interested in hearing what she had to say.

She explained to me why what I said was so damaging. I agreed that if I'd been saying that, then of course it would have been damaging, but anyway, I wasn't saying that, I was saying this.

This, said my friend, is absolutely the same as that, and here's why.

This and that are fundamentally different, I countered, and here's why your account of what this means to me isn't at all an accurate reflection of what I mean by it.

If this isn't what you mean by this, she asked, why would you use the word you used to describe it?

When Right and Wrong Got Muddled

Anyway, we went on like that for about twenty minutes. And then intermission was over, so we took a break from our fighting to enjoy the rest of the concert, and then in the parking lot, we revisited our earlier conversation, analyzed both why I had said what I said, and why she'd heard what she heard.

By the end of Conversation II: The Re-Reckoning, we'd come to a loose understanding that 1) I hadn't been saying what she'd understood me to be saying, and 2) I could have taken some steps to improve the talk dramatically in ways that wouldn't have changed my intended meaning, but would have eliminated the possibility of unintentionally conveying that instead of this. Or whatever.

It’s okay to be wrong, even if it’s just a little. But what really matters is having someone you can trust to tell you when you are.