This week I watched a TED talk given by a women Named Kathryn Schulz. She introduces new ideas about right and wrong and how people deal with both situations.
Kathryn Schulz talked about how the world feels about being wrong. I completely agreed when she said there was a difference in being wrong and realizing you’re wrong. If you don’t know you’re wrong you still think you’re right, and everything seems good. It’s not until we realized that we made a mistake that we begin to feel embarrassed. Like the cartoon when people run off a cliff and don’t fall until they look down. We cling to the idea of being and feeling right because we don’t have something internal that tells us when we’re wrong, like Kathryn said. We don’t want to make errors so we won’t look for them; In other words, “error blindness.”
When she said that the preconceived notion of human beings is that they way to be successful in life is mistakes, I realized that it is drilled into us from the beginning. If we make a mistake in school, we get bad grades. If we make a mistake at home we have to do extra chores or we lose our privileges. This makes people feel the need to be perfect. Do you feel this? If not, how do you avoid it? Growing up I felt like need to be perfect all the time. I would see my sister getting punished for bad grades, so I would get anxiety that the same thing would happen to me. I’ve come to realized that being successful is all about making mistakes. The things the dictates success is not if you fail, but if you learn from your failures and decide keep moving forward.
I found it interesting that a woman went to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a knee surgery and the surgeon performed the operation on the wrong knee. After the event, the senior vice president for healthcare quality said “For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient.” This showed that your internal sense of rightness isn’t always right. The attachment of feeling this rightness makes people want to prevent the feeling of wrong more often, and can lead to treating others badly when someone has a different opinion.
I wish I could have been in the audience to ask her after misreading the signs and sharing her knowledge of wrong if she still tries to stop mistakes or if she now embraces them. I would want to know if being aware that people prevent mistakes to keep from being wrong helps with the embarrassing feeling if you do end up being wrong.
