I hosted a Ted Talk lunch & learn again today. Play a Ted Talk, discuss for ten minutes, half-hour commitment tops. My pick today was Kathryn Schulz’s 2011 talk “On being wrong.” I must’ve read the transcript to pick this a few weeks ago, but I didn’t remember it well and hadn’t watched it before.
The talk got to me today. In that “uffda I feel called out” and “now I might cry?” kind of way?
Schulz talks about what most of us know intellectually– that we all make mistakes, all err, all are wrong about something — but so much of that goes out the window on an individual level.
“This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly,” she says after calling out the assumptions we go through when we encounter someone who disagrees with us: they’re ignorant, they’re an idiot, or they’re evil.
I know intellectually that there is so much I don’t know and I like to think that I change and grow and listen. But I’ll also admit I think there are a lot of ignorant, idiotic, or evil people in our country right now. Schultz also points out that being wrong feels exactly like being right. And I definitely believe I am “right” about a lot.
It’s worth the full watch, but I’ll close with this quote from the talk:
“We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong. But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead. George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East. And something else happened instead. And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life, until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. And something else happened instead. And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together. And something else happened instead.
I mean, this is life. For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us.“
With Love,
Natalie