Sometimes You Make Mistkaes
Kathryn Schulz' Being Wrong - A Short Review
“To f*ck up is to find adventure.”
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep reading Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error until Schulz made this point at the end of chapter two. I thought all of chapter one and most of chapter two were too abstract and philosophical for my taste. But then, in the last pages of chapter two, she set the hook and both my highlighter and I were in. That’s when she wrote about the medieval knight errant and reminded readers that the Latin word errare, meaning “to roam”, gave rise to the English words “error” and “errand”. The English word “errant” can be used to express either idea. But enough about etymology. To be errant is to be wrong but also to be on an adventure.
In this spirit, Schulz gives readers the ‘Cuz It’s True Constraint: you believe what you believe because your convictions (you believe) are based on facts. You’re willing to accept the general notion that your beliefs may be biased, but if you pick a particular belief, you’ll probably say, “but not that one”1. You don’t believe things because they make you feel better, smarter, or more in control. That’s what other people do. You believe things because they’re correct. Wrong is something other people do and they do it for the wrong reasons. Schulz points out that even when you do admit you were wrong, it immediately becomes past tense because you no longer believe the same thing. You were wrong. Being wrong is not something people like. But, sometimes, you will be wrong. Mistakes will be made, even by you.
So why do you make errors? One big reason is that your brain is really good at inductive reasoning. You extrapolate out from a little bit of evidence to make claims that reach farther than they should. For example, you learn language by hearing others conjugate a verb a few times then you go out and conjugate it the exact same way in every situation until someone points out that you should say “took” instead of “taked”. People are built to work on assumptions and you don’t realize when that gets you into trouble. As Schulz phrased it, “every one of us confuses our models of the world with the world itself” (p. 107).
You silently substitute how you think the world works for how it actually works and then quickly convince yourself of the certainty of your model. So if you are certain that your model is how the world works and you see that my model is different from yours, then my model and, therefore my world, is wrong. You can see all the ways that my world is wrong but you can’t see how yours might be wrong in the slightest. You see my certainty as laughable but your own certainty as righteous. (It is worth remembering that this book was published in 2010 and written even earlier than that so there is now more than a decade of social media to show just how right Schulz is about how people treat being wrong.)
To me, the beauty of the book is that Schulz doesn’t turn it into a how-to on not being wrong, nor does she pontificate. She writes an ode to and explanation of “wrongology”. The closest Schulz gets to telling readers what to do about being wrong is suggesting that it is about far more than getting your facts straight.
But facing up to the true scope and nature of our errors is also (and more self-evidently) psychologically demanding. Crucially, these two challenges are inseparable: if we can’t do the emotional work of fully accepting our mistakes, we can’t do the conceptual work of figuring out where, how, and why we made them. (p. 207)
Schulz is saying that people aren’t naturally inclined to fix their mistakes because they don’t want to see them. It costs people too much emotionally to admit their mistakes, so they hide from them as much as possible. But, Schulz says, facing up to those mistakes is necessarily intertwined with actually doing something about them. You can’t fix what you are unable to see. But seeing is painful.
There is a vulnerability in being wrong and it scares the crap out of people. Because fixing your mistakes means fixing yourself as well as your facts. But Schulz describes an “optimistic model of wrongness” in which error is a force that “imperceptibly helps...us human beings - to grow up” (p. 289). She’s saying that being brave enough to admit your mistakes to others is what makes you a better person as much as, if not more than, fixing the mistakes themselves.
So what does this have to do with coaching? Nothing. Everything. I take this book as an invitation to admit to and talk about being wrong. How does my wrongness affect my decisions? How does it affect how I treat those I see as wrong? How do I deal with my mistakes when they are made apparent? How do I treat those that show me my errors? As a coach, your relationships with athletes in your care (and with so many others) are built on trust and a power imbalance. Your positions of power can raise the stakes on the errors you make. Do you rely on your power to make things “right”? Do you rely on some version of “because I’m the grown up and I know better” to paper over your misjudgments? When you rely on your power to manage your mistakes, you do so at the expense of the trust placed in you. Your model of the world encourages you to be certain you have done the right thing so it’s difficult to understand why faith in you would erode.
There’s a tension between being right and being trusted. Coaches can go through their entire careers believing that the source of their trust is their knowledge. But the truth is trust and knowledge are far less related than you think. That might be my biggest takeaway from Schulz’ book. I don’t have to sell others on my certainty because I can gain trust just as well with my sincerity. Showing others how I manage uncertainty and error makes me more trustworthy because they never have to feel like I’m trying to convince them of something. I’d rather be wrong and deal with the consequences. After all, that’s where the adventure is.
David McRaney, podcaster and author of How Minds Change, makes a similar case. He recounts that he often asks people if they are wrong about anything, to which they reply that they are. When he asks them what they are currently wrong about, they can’t come up with an example. You need someone or something to show you that you’re wrong.