Almost nobody thinks they’re perfect. We all know we sometimes misunderstand, sometimes misjudge, and otherwise make mistakes. And yet, people still have difficulty admitting they are wrong. I imagine the dialogue going something like:

Person 1: Do you ever make mistakes?
Person 2: Of course, I’m human.
Person 1: Well, what about that time you cut the budget for the redesign project?
Person 2: That was the right thing to do because …
Person 1: And when you fired Jared?
Person 2: I know people disagreed, but Jared had to go because …
Person 1: What about when you promised the client we’d deliver by November 15?
Person 2: Sure, we ended up slipping into January, but if I hadn’t done that …

Somehow what happens is that we agree in principle but disagree in particular for every single situation. That’s odd, right? How is it we can acknowledge that we make mistakes and yet never find a mistake?

The answer is ego. Admitting we make mistakes in the abstract is easy. Admitting that we made a specific mistake in a specific situation means accepting responsibility for the specific negative consequences that resulted. It means admitting specific flaws in ourselves. When that happens, it’s too real.

The fact is that the reasoning that led us to make the mistake is embedded in what we believe, and we probably believe the same things now as when we made the mistake. The problem with the mistake is that it made sense at the time, and so it will also make sense later, even when the results aren’t what we intended. The thinking that made us make that mistake is going to make it hard for us to understand the thinking that recognizes the mistake. To actually manifest our stated belief in real life, we have to accept that it’s when we feel that we’re right that we’re most likely to be wrong.

I had a meeting with a long-time colleague recently. He heard me out on an idea, and he cautioned me that the the way I expressed it might be understood a different way and thus have a different effect than I intended. His perspective didn’t make sense or sound valid to me, which made me want to dismiss it. But that is exactly why I needed to hear it. If it had made sense, then I would have expressed the idea differently, and I wouldn’t need him to tell me what he did. The fact that it felt right was a strong signal I needed to hear how it might be wrong.