Sunday, May 4, 2014

Being Wrong Isn’t so Bad

I usually have to be in the right mood to get into a self-help book like Being Wrong and this book borders on being self-help as well as informative, almost philosophical at times.  The premise of this book is about our perception of being wrong and how it is ingrained in us at a very early age.  I stumbled upon this author as she was a speaker for a TED talk, which is well worth watching.

I don’t know that I could do this book justice in any sort of summary, but I can tell you how it made me feel.  The book was long, the writing something you’d expect in an educational textbook.  There were times the prose was over-the-top, as if Schulz didn’t intend this to reach a wide audience, just a well-educated one.  And in that approach, she misses out on a good amount of the population because the ideas aren’t for everyone, or accessible for everyone.

The idea that being wrong isn’t a bad thing is one that is so deeply ingrained that one book won’t sway you from doing your best to avoid it or recognising that when you make a mistake, you learn something from it.  Throughout the book, Schulz depicts various situations where one sticks to their belief that he/she can’t possibly be wrong, but in the end, the desire to be right is greater than whether or not the person is truly right.  In that vein, the book reveals that being right and sticking to long-held beliefs doesn’t make you right, but in many ways making one narrow-minded.

I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, or even if I’m saying too much, but the idea is one that I haven’t quite been able to shake and that lasting effect is the one I look forward to in all books.  It is rare to get it from a self-help style book and this one is worth a shot.

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