Being Right Feels Nice, But Being Wrong Is Better
My brother and I were talking about how often we each find ourselves “right” in a disagreement with our partners. He said that he and his partner of a year actually started keeping track. So far, my brother has been wrong 4 times. This includes all those little “I think the restaurant is this way” sort of disagreements. My brother is the sort of person who won’t claim something to be true unless he knows for pretty darn certain that it’s true. Alex and I don’t actually keep track, but I’m forced to admit that he is pretty much always right. We’ve been together for 13 years now, and his average is probably similar to my brother’s…he’s wrong about 4 times a year.
But knowing that doesn’t stop me from being certain that I’m right *this time*. Whatever the argument happens to be, and even if he reminds me that he’s pretty much always right (perhaps even especially if he reminds me of that), I’m still really sure that in this case I really DO remember better than him where the restaurant is. Fortunately, he usually just carries on with his plans and we get to the restaurant which is right where he said it would be, and this is why we are still together after 13 years, instead of lost and not speaking to each other somewhere in North Dakota. (Got that kids? Secret to long relationships: If you are right, just do whatever you want and ignore your partner.)
But I digress. I’ve actually been doing some really interesting reading lately about how brains work, and how we change our thinking over time, either because we realize we were wrong about something, or because we have some sort of problem-solving insight. The first book is called Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz. She talks a lot about how awesome it feels to be right, and even better to be able to say “I told you so.”
“The brilliance of this phrase…derives from its admirably compact way of making the point that not only was I right, I was right about being right. In the instant of uttering it, I become right squared, maybe even right factorial, logarithmically right–at any rate really, extremely right.”
We all know this feeling, right? It feels awesome. But not surprisingly, it’s not very useful, except in the sense that it motivates us to keep trying to get things right, even when we get them wrong a lot more often. And Schulz argues that being wrong is actually a lot more useful. Pretty much all of science is based on being wrong, and then trying to figure out why. You know, like, there’s that whole Sun revolving around the Earth thing, which you can think of as just an embarrassing naivete on the part of humanity, or you can look at it as part of the process of figuring out how things work, which is a pretty cool thing to figure out.
The second book, which I haven’t finished yet, but is really expanding on these ideas is Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson. He talks a lot about being wrong, because it turns out that a lot of good ideas come from bad ones. Or at least good ideas tend to thrive in an environment that accommodates a lot of bad ideas passing through. He points out that really innovative people tend to have a lot of bad ideas. Not just numerically more, but proportionally more. So if Person A has 10 ideas, maybe 1 of them turns out to be a good one. If Person B has 100 ideas, you would expect 10 of them to be good. But it turns out that people who tend to have good ideas actually have way MORE bad ideas. Like for every 100 ideas, maybe only 5 of them are good, which is a much poorer percentage than Person A. But still, Person A has had only 1 good idea while Person B has had 5 of them.
Someone told me that Madeleine L’Engle once said that the secret to being a good writer is to write at least 15 minutes of absolute crap every day. I can’t find a reference for that, so maybe she didn’t actually say it, but it still seems like good advice, given the context of these two books. It’s true that the more you do things, the more you’ll do them wrong. But it’s also true that you’ll do more things right. And when you do them right, they are more likely to be admirably, excitingly, innovatively right.
There are two key concepts from Johnson’s book that really resonate for me. One is the idea of the “adjacent possible”. If you are living in the age of steam engines, and you invent a computer (which Charles Babbage did in 1837), it’s not going to take off. There just doesn’t exist a solid enough footing to make so great a leap. Innovation can really only happen one step at a time. Johnson uses the analogy of standing in a room, from which you can choose 4 doors. Once you open one of those doors, you are in another room, again with 4 more doors to choose from. Eventually, you will have explored the whole behemoth mansion, but you can only do it one room at a time. This resonated for me with the AA concept I learned recently, called, “Do the next right thing.” It’s easy to be overwhelmed by a mansions-worth of rooms, but you can only get to 4 of them from here, so just open the next door and see what’s there.
The next concept is actually a physiological phenomenon that happens on the neurological level. I’m totally paraphrasing here, and I might not have it exactly right (neurology being kind of complex and all), but basically, all your synapses go along sending information in pretty measured patterns. It’s like your brain is an orchestra playing a very measured 4-beat waltz. And then all of a sudden, each person in the orchestra (each neuron) all of a sudden bursts out into improvisational jazz, each one in a totally different key and on a different rhythm. This little jazz riff in your brain lasts about 5 microseconds, and they happen fairly frequently. There have been some studies about this phenomenon that show a direct correlation between more frequent and longer duration jazz riffs and higher IQ. To oversimplify, the more neurological chaos (within the limits of functionality), the more smarts. Johnson (and many others) theorizes that this chaos allows neurons that otherwise wouldn’t have ever connected, to create new patterns and pathways in the brain. And the more pathways you have to choose from, the more “adjacent possible” options there are.
So to connect the two books, let’s continue this room analogy. The average person stands in this room and sees 4 doors. They choose one, and move through life learning and growing, but along pretty standard paths. But a person who has (or cultivates) a greater tolerance for chaos, and a comfort with being wrong, realizes that there are other things outside this room no matter which direction you go. There doesn’t have to be a door. So that person might spend a lot more time accidentally opening closet doors and pulling up floorboards that don’t lead anywhere, but they are a lot more likely to find the secret passageway that leads outside the house to the bright light of the Sun revolving around the Earth instead of the other way around.
And that is why I am still a better person than Alex, even though he is right more often. (Got that, kids? Feeling superior to your partner–very important to any relationship.)
LMAO – seriously, totally laughed my ass off at a phew things here, like the quote . . . but ESPECIALLY your closing.
(I’m telling you some of this stuff because you’re our coach, not because it’s good blog commenting — going to sound like an insane narcissist here:)
Very interesting . . . and it’s great that it makes me feel brilliant because of my chaotic jazz head. Note: one of the characteristics of having ADD is “felt chaos”, a term whose sound I love about how everything feels and is perceived as chaotic because of the way your brain is overwhelmed by assloads of cacophony. One of the most useful compliments a teacher gave me was that I’m good at synthesizing . . . pulling together seemingly disparate pieces of information and experience. I really want to focus on applying that skill/way-of-thinking in my life and projects and stories more . . . make it a priority.
I also want to be good at just opening adjacent doors, too . . . because it makes life more manageable/saner. There has to be a balance between sanity and brilliance.
Thanks for sharing & putting together (synthesizing!) all of this info!
I think those are totally blog-appropriate comments
It’s always cool to know what thoughts get triggered in the reader.
I think that’s one of the reasons you and I work well together, that we have similar capacities for holding on to lots of chaotic information and still usually functioning in the world. I like what you said about balance, that’s definitely a recurring theme in my life in lots of different contexts. Knowing when is the time for just walking through the next door and when is the time for rooting around under the floorboards…definitely important
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