When You Realize You’re Wrong (and it’s a good thing).

My daughter hates being wrong. This is not an exaggeration; she will eat a disgusting creation of yogurt and mustard to prove her point.

She also comes by this trait somewhat naturally.

Realizing you’ve been wrong about something is simultaneously disorienting and humbling. Depending on how passionate you are in your convictions, “being wrong” can feel like an intense personal failure. (And I’m generally pretty passionate in my convictions.)

But over the course of this year, I have been realizing that being wrong about something — and subsequently admitting it — is an incredibly under-rated catalyst for personal and professional growth.

Here’s the most recent example: Artificial Intelligence, specifically in the form of Chat GPT. With a Masters in English and a deep-seated love of books (and writing, for that matter), I staunchly held onto what I believed to be true. Chat GPT was the devil! It would never be used in my life! Until one day I was a little desperate for some help with a project, and created a Chat GPT account. The rest is history . . .

Since then, the team and I have used it a myriad of times to help with the nitty-gritty of recruiting: to create job descriptions and to help with technical keyword sourcing, to name a few. But more broadly than that, I’ve used it to challenge my thinking, to create outlines, and to get input.

I still don’t think it’s going to replace recruiting (or marketing for that matter). And while I still draw a pretty hard line related to my personal content or even the Forge social content, I would be failing as a leader if I did not explore the ways it could impact our company for good.

So, I was wrong in a pretty big way. I’ve seen this “error in my ways” a few times since founding and leading Forge (and also since having kids). The tricky thing about “the buck stops here” is that you really don’t have anyone else to blame, whether it be for hiring, firing, payroll, parenting, or . . . Chat GPT.

The realization that I was THIS wrong about something shook me.

Now, you could probably argue that I need some added humility if being wrong shook me so much, but something felt different about this realization. Maybe it was because writing was something I took (take) pride in? Maybe it was because the change in my opinion happened in a relatively short timeframe?

But it probably had more to do with the fact that around the same timeframe, I realized I was wrong about a few other situations that were frankly more critical and more personal in nature. But how could I be wrong about so many things at once?

The reality is that I’ve probably always been wrong about a lot of things. And maybe part of the gift of getting older is that you realize things more quicky.

So lately I have been learning to hold my opinions a little bit more loosely. That we don’t know all the things we think we do, and that ever-so-slight chance that we might be wrong about it should cause our view to expand.

Because really, being wrong is a gift.

The weight of being always right is too much for any human to bear. Being wrong about things lets us open up our horizons to new ideas, new growth, and new futures.

Whether you look at air travel, automobiles, or gene therapy to treat blindness, thank goodness we have been wrong about things. That we can quite simply say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong,” and move forward in a brand new direction of curiosity and light.