Feeling right about being wrong

Everyone can remember a time when their teacher passed back an exam or term paper so full of red ink that we quickly flipped it over so the kid sitting behind us did not see how clueless we were. Being wrong makes one lose their confidence and can even instill negative feelings in on a rudimentary level. Consider the above scenario with a mindset of embracing our wrongs and actually learning from our mistakes. Looking through that paper and analyzing where and why we had erred instead of being embarrassed would actually result in learning more and bettering ourselves. This is the fundamental difference between ego driven close mindedness and a productive life long learner.

Has history given us an human being that is perfectly right throughout their lives? No, in fact the common thread between stories about Prophets, Masters and inventors is the transcendence and transformation from wrong to right. Gandhi said it best when he stated \”Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.\”

Journalist and Author Kathryn Schultz is a self proclaimed \’wrongologist\’ who has recently written and released a book titled \”Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.\” Her claim is that our tendency to err is also what makes us smart and we gain from embracing it.

Excerpt from her website:
To err is human. Yet most of us go through life tacitly assuming (and sometimes noisily insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. If being wrong is so natural, why are we all so bad at imagining that our beliefs could be mistaken – and why do we typically react to our errors with surprise, denial, defensiveness and shame?

In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken, and how this attitude toward error corrodes our relationships—whether between family members, colleagues, neighbors, or nations. Along the way, she takes us on a fascinating tour of human fallibility, from wrongful convictions to no-fault divorce, medical mistakes to misadventures at sea, failed prophecies to false memories, “I told you so!” to “Mistakes were made.” Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she proposes a new way of looking at wrongness. In this view, error is both a given and a gift – one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and, most profoundly, ourselves.

In the end, Being Wrong is not just an account of human error but a tribute to human creativity – to the ways we generate and revise our beliefs about ourselves and the world. At a moment when economic, political, and religious dogmatism increasingly divide us, Schulz explores the seduction of certainty and the crisis occasioned by error with uncommon humor and eloquence. A brilliant debut from a new voice in nonfiction, this book calls on us to ask one of life’s most challenging questions: what if I’m wrong?

BONUS: In her role as a journalist for Slate, Kathryn Schulz interviews Diane Ravitch. As assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush and a longtime conservative eduction activist and scholar, Ravitch once crusaded for nationally mandated testing, charter schools, school choice, and No Child Left Behind. Today, she rejects all those positions as bad for America\’s communities, schools, teachers, and kids provocatively stating \”We are in the grips of a kind of national madness\”