May 30, 2024
An interesting
section of the book How to Win Friends and Influence
People discusses the value of being comfortable with the
possibility of being wrong. Even if you 'know' you're right,
starting a sentence with "I may be wrong, but this is how I see it"
seems to be a much better way to have a conversation.
I put 'know' in quotes because even if you feel very strongly
about being right, it's hard to really know for sure. One thing
that comes to mind is the viral photo of a dress that circulated
some years back. You may have seen it. It's a striped dress that
stirred up a lot of arguments because people were roughly divided
in half on what colors the stripes were: black and blue, or white
and gold?
There are other examples of these visual and auditory
phenomena where two people can see and hear completely different
things. Can't the same be said about our perception of information
we receive? It's possible for two people to perceive the same
information in completely different ways, so it's hard to
definitively say who is right.
Being okay with being wrong demonstrates humility and—in my
opinion—can turn many conversations into learning opportunities
rather than arguments.
This is a little longer than usual, but I wanted to end this
with a quote from Socrates “All I Know Is That I Know
Nothing”
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These podcasts (starting with this episode) also now have
video. If you want to check out the episodes with video, check them
out on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/@busmsk