Be Wrong More.
Anyone paying attention can tell you the world appears to be moving fast enough to make your head spin. Especially with all of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) filling our news cycles and digital feeds lately.
The prevailing wisdom is that robots are coming to take our jobs and things will never be the same. I don’t think it’s that binary. To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
When it comes to AI and these advances in technology, the choice remains: ignore it or embrace the change, but know it’s here.
Why is it so hard to embrace change?
Because we humans hate being wrong. It doesn’t matter how clearly toxic the candidate is or how obvious it is that a particular habit or behavior is killing us - we refuse to change course.
We’re more intoxicated with being right than we are with the alternative.
Going to a 12 week coding bootcamp at age 42 meant I had to get over my fear of being wrong. A lot. As in every day we were learning things that made me realize I don’t know as much as I thought I did. And as an adult that’s a hard pill to swallow. But learning to code continues to pay literal and financial dividends in ways I can never measure.
It starts in school, where you’re rewarded for remembering what’s on the test, even though you have no idea how to actually apply any of it in a practical sense. So we spend years taking tests only to graduate and realize we may be slightly educated but far from smart. Because smart comes from experience, and experience comes from mistakes. Nobody wants to make mistakes, because if you do, you’re wrong. And nobody wants to be wrong. There’s no degree plan for that.
It’s difficult to stress how important it is for us to embrace the idea of being wrong in order to learn new things. Taking a chance at being wrong can be intimidating, but it creates coping skills that will make the difference between progress and excuses. Between having a job or losing a job.
Being wrong means we can learn new skills and embrace new realities instead of insulating ourselves in our own bubble of bullshit and comfort. It’s difficult to feel sorry for some of the archaic systems that are rapidly being replaced by technology when these same systems refuse to evolve. Because the decision makers don’t want to be wrong.
I like to dedicate one day a week to learning something I didn’t know the week before. A new coding language, a new tool, a new way of thinking. Because I know what got me here won’t get me there, and being wrong means there’s nowhere to hide.
The future is bright. Be wrong more often.