Kathryn Schulz: On being wrong

"The miracle of your mind is not that you can see the world as it is.  [It is] so that you can see the world as it isn't."
- Kathryn Schulz

Here is a truth that no one likes talking about.  Everyone is fallible.  We all make mistakes and make wrong decisions.  We do that more often than we care to admit.  The challenge is to balance our fallibility with our uniqueness and create something great while working with others.

This challenge is especially true for entrepreneurs.  Founders are the most self assured ones in the group.  It is very difficult for founders to admit there are things that they got wrong and examine how to fix the problem.  But this introspection of asking whether we are right on big questions is absolutely required for those who are in the top positions.


What's funny is that our ability to get things wrong plays a key role in creating something new.  Without the imagination of seeing things that do not exist there won't be any creativity to fuel entrepreneurial spirit.  To create that did not exist before entrepreneurs must be able to project their vision and believe that it can happen.

Kathryn Schulz captured these points in her 2011 TED talk.



The lesson is not stopping from making decisions in the fear of getting things wrong.  It's embracing our own fallibility and build on our differences to create something greater than any one of us.