Being Wrong Can Be the Best Thing to Happen to You

By Cristina Pagnoncelli

Making a mistake, screwing up a major project, or seeing your business fail sucks. Being wrong on any scale is a blow to your self-confidence, makes you question the path you’re on, and cripples your motivation to move forward. But there’s another way to think about failure: it’s inevitable. James Clear writes over on his blog:

For some reason, we often expect our first choice to be the optimal choice. However, it’s actually quite normal for your first attempt to be incorrect or wrong. When it comes to complex issues like determining the values you want in a partner or selecting the path of your career, your first attempt will rarely lead to the optimal solution.

So if failure is unavoidable, what does that mean for reaching success, and how do you reframe it as productive? Clear has collected a handful of helpful learnings from his failures over the years as an entrepreneur, writer, and photographer. When you’re next mired in a mental miasma over a serious misstep, consider his reflections:

Choices that seem poor in hindsight are an indication of growth, not self-worth or intelligence…. If you know enough about something to make the optimal decision on the first try, then you’re not challenging yourself.

Given that your first choice is likely to be wrong, the best thing you can do is get started. The faster you learn from being wrong, the sooner you can discover what is right…. The best way to learn is to start practicing.

Break down topics that are too big to master into smaller tasks that can be mastered…. If you want to get better at making accurate first choices, then play in a smaller arena.

The time to trust your gut is when you have the knowledge or experience to back it up. You can trust yourself to make sharp decisions in areas where you already have proven expertise. For everything else, the only way to discover what works is to adopt a philosophy of experimentation.

So not only is being wrong a great thing, given that it more often than not represents an opportunity to grow, it’s an essential stepping stone to success. You can decrease your failure rate by dividing huge ideas into smaller, actionable mini-ideas, and by getting lots of practice experimenting, but you won’t be able to skip straight from lightbulb to history-making glory.

The trick here is that you have to work out the mental muscle that can recognize failure, learn from it, and leverage those learnings into moving forward. Being wrong is only awesome if you use your error in the right way. As economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford writes in his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure:

Success comes through rapidly fixing our mistakes rather than getting things right first time.

So screwing up isn’t bad. You just have to make sure you’re listening closely to yourself and the feedback of those around you to gauge when, why, and how a failure went down in order to spin it into gold.

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