9 Reasons The Right People Will Always Be Wrong
1. You’re not always right, and knowing that will make you stronger
Being wrong is essential to growth, because when you can admit you are wrong, you can learn. In your 20’s, you will hopefully be wrong and grow every single day.
2. The future can be right if you’re wrong now
Your 20’s are a time that come after you’ve had two decades and some change to learn, experience, and form opinions, values, and beliefs—so what will your next decades be about?
3. The afterglow of changing your mind is extremely satisfying
Those first-algebra-problem-you-ever-solved aha! moments of using new information to improve your thinking (and change your life for the better) will be ones you have to seek out. Those realizations are the ones you have to be wrong, or at least admittedly less-than-right, to experience.
4. You love being right more than you really want to be better, and that’s holding you back
Human beings hate being wrong We look for information that makes us feel right (see: confirmation bias) and avoid information that makes us question our beliefs, values, surroundings, and thoughts. But this only prevents us from shiftings our perspectives, understanding others, and growing as a generation.
5. Being okay with being aware that you’re wrong is healthy
When we do recognize we’re wrong, we sometimes do it in an unhealthy way: we blow negative memories out of proportion as a punishment system to stop ourselves from repeating past mistakes, which can result in the repetition of said past ‘mistakes.’ Yes, that is a simplistic description of the self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s a real relationship between your thoughts and your behavior.
6. You can recognize that you’re wrong without destroying what you’re right about
You can realize how impossible it can be to ‘know,’ and realize how possible it is understand. If you’re a guy, can you know what it’s like to be a girl? No. Can you try to listen to a girl in order to better understand? Yes. The same goes for other roles in gender, race, socioeconomics, sexual orientation—the list goes on.
7. Being wrong doesn’t mean being awful
Knowing that you are often wrong is a good thing. It means being self-aware—as long as you can learn from another person or source of information about something, acknowledge that you were wrong, and go forth being less of a fool.
8. Being wrong means being skeptical, which is a positive trait
If this all sounds like some shoddy pop science, freshman year psychology class essay junk that could be the preface to a horoscope, it’s because it is; the author is 24 and half-right and half-wrong about (at least) half of all the things. So why are you reading this? Because you know that you are 20-whatever and half-right and half-wrong and hopefully aware that you are (more than likely, save the real before-their-time early masters) not an expert on anything. To be skeptical is to be capable of believing multiple truths, of seeing things from all their sides.
9. To be wrong is to have the potential to be powerfully right
So this just took you through some Cheshire cat pseudo-logic for nothing and you might be kind of pissed off at that. You could close this tab now and everything would stay as it was before, us not knowing or caring what the other thinks, feels, or experiences. You could close this tab and stay right and wrong about a lot of things. But maybe wrong isn’t the right term. Maybe the right term is ‘being more willing to shut up, listen, learn, and grow up.’ And maybe we know should do that forever: listen and learn. Shut up and let other people speak. Wait for other people to shut up and speak up for ourselves when they do. And maybe we are going to be the first generation to enter our 30’s with that powerful knowledge.
But all of that could always be wrong, and so could you. And that’s a beautiful thing to be right about.