How wrong we are when we're wrong
When we are at school we feel bad when we're wrong. The academic system and almost every other system in life (even the Business environment until not so long ago) punishes people being wrong. If you're wrong you're gonna get yelled at, a bad great, grounded for three months and with no Internet.
As humans we're wired to be wrong and learn from that. It's a path of self discovery where you learn from your mistakes and never make them again. In high school I was not the brightest student and I made many mistakes, later I found that all the mistakes I made I became really good at not making them again. So being wrong is probably one of the best teachers out there. Sorry reputed academics, but being wrong seems to teach us in a very different way, one that almost every time sticks with us.
Academia sees knowledge as the main goal, therefore being wrong in applying is not acceptable. The academic system has the goal of teaching us and to test what we know they came up with a grading system. That grading system considers mistakes as a negative and punish them with no points or even negative points in exams. All the years we spend in schools (specially they years where our brain is developing) wire us to think that being wrong is bad. Academia is very good for learning they've done amazing developments, the problem is the grading system in use.
The good news is that even if we're wired to avoid being wrong we end up being wrong. When we're wrong we can have two possible choices:
- Be mad at ourselves for being wrong and think the worst of us.
- Learn from the mistake and take it as part of our growing process knowing that we can correct course.
Of course, we are wired to do the first thing. Many times when we screw something up we feel ashamed of telling we made a mistake and fear that the worse can happen. So if we do this we may need to be medicated with some serious brain rewiring.
I try to rewire my brain every day so I'll share some steps that have worked for me. Maybe this will work for you too.
- Look forward to failing: Start doing something that you don't know anything about. Like for example learning HTML. I started learning HTML when Liza Sperling gathered a group of people willing to learn playing Neo Pets. I started there and did some bad looking HTML mockups. I looked to fail, because I had no idea how to do it and then as I failed I started correcting myself by reading books about it and just iterating a lot. The point here is that we often don't do things because we are afraid to fail. If we look to fail we'll learn things that could make the difference.
- When you fail audit your thoughts: Usually when we fail our mind tends to run in lot's of thoughts. What I do is I write them down and see what I usually think when I fail. It ends up being that when we fail we tend to be to harsh with ourselves. If we audit our thoughts and come up with counter arguments to what we think, next time we will know that all those things that we tell to ourselves are not true and we will rewire our the way we think when we are wrong.
- When you're wrong go through your mistakes and study them: When you're wrong you usually get something right, make sure you acknowledge that and see that your mistake could've been one small part. Sometimes we let mistakes become huge. The truth is that most of our mistakes are small and we can correct them by studying what we did wrong and learning to improve that small part. Usually we will quit the whole thing when in reality we are closer to getting it that to failing.
This three steps have helped me rewire my brain to some extent and stop being down when I make a bad decision. This may not work for you, but no matter how you do it try to rewire yourself from feeling bad when being wrong to turning it into a full learning opportunity. In school someone obliged us to learn after our mistakes. In the "real world" no one is there to do that and we naturally tend to quit doing that.
Let's don't let the academic system scare us from being wrong. Let's embrace that 8 out of 10 times we're going to be wrong in something and let's make a learning experience out of it, to make us better at whatever we may want to be.
So how are we correct when being wrong? That's simple.
Understand that mistakes are a part of life and that we can learn a lot from them and better. Finally the world will divide between the ones who quit and the ones who keep learning.
