We hate it when we are wrong.
We feel less.
We feel somehow diminished.
When debating, most of us don’t listen.
We instead form rebuttals. And think of how we can be vindicated and proven right.
But take a look at who actually benefits when they’re proven wrong.
When you are proven your wrong you gain new insight.
You learn something.
You become smarter.
You are better off for it.
You actually gain when you are proven wrong.
It may not feel good, but you should actually thank people for spending the time to correct you.
I’m not saying that it always feels good, or that you never need to demonstrate you are right.
But if you can suspend your thoughts for a moment, and listen to hear what others have to say, you might learn something. Especially if you are wrong.
And when you look at being wrong in this light it won’t hurt as much, and you will be smarter for it.
The Agile Warrior 
Jul 11, 2011 @ 19:47:39
My response to this post grew long enough to need a post of its own, at
http://allcritiquesgreatandsmall.blogspot.com/2011/07/fear-of-failure.html
The summary of that post is that while I completely agree with the value of learning from failure, the big obstacles are the perceived social costs of failure, especially within a team of peers. Overcoming that problem is much harder, though apparently improv groups have figured it out.
Jul 14, 2011 @ 10:08:06
Good post and you are totally right, thanks Jonathan!
Jul 14, 2011 @ 16:22:05
I completely agree Chris.
In fact I failed my own test today.
I got into an argument about who owns quality on an agile project (the QA dept or the team) and was so convinced I was right I completely stopped listening to what the other person was saying.
I was determined to make my point.
Get them to see the wisdom in what I was telling them.
But I was wrong.
Wrong in the sense I didn’t fully appreciated the org structure of the company we were dealing with.
Wrong in the sense that until the QA dept reported to the team (and not their far and distant manager) were we going to be able to infect change.
It’s tough. I fail at it way more often than I would like.
But at least I learned something – even though I didn’t like it and it felt uncomfortable at the time.
Thanks for sharing your post – great comment.