Its Ok To Be Wrong

I used to attribute it to being a Pisces ,but ever since i could remember,i have always hated being wrong. By hate i dont mean the "i lost the argument,feel kinda bad" type of hate,no,im talking about the "im not agreeing with your opinion even if you show me all the proof in the world" kind of hate.

I used to be a really smart kid (well, before varsity happened that is). I was always top of my class,second best at worst. Primary school,i never really needed any help with my homework,everything was just super easy and straight to the point. But starting from junior school,things started getting a bit heavy. Homework started getting a bit too difficult for my little brain so i had to do what i hated the most ,asking for help. Now the reason i hated asking for help was that ,in my little 13 year old brain,asking for help was basically you admitting how stupid you are. Quite a stupid assumption right?well arent all teenagers dumb. Anyway, so i would go to my mum and ask her for my help with homework,she would agree. So whilst she is there trying to help me,one thing frustrated her the most. I never wanted to admit that what she was telling me was correct or what i was saying was wrong. Nope. Every time she got one of the answers correct,i would do one of the following. Either i told her i already knew the answer and i was just testing her or just blatantly tell her that her answer is wrong. I never just admitted that i was wrong and she was right. Although she did try to instill me the value of admitting that its ok to be wrong sometimes ,i never really listened because well,teenagers always think they know better than everyone else.

So as i grew up into my late teens ,this mentality still stuck around with me. But the only difference now was that now i wasn't only dealing with my mother,i was dealing with more people in my everyday life and those people were may less tolerable of my attitude than my dearest mother,so instead of trying to determine why most people considered me hard to deal with or be friends with,i made my conclusion that it was so because they were simply not as smart as i am so they couldn't keep up. So i spent most of my teen years friendless and could not keep relationships for long because of my attitude. Sad as that sounds,weirdly it didn't hurt me much then because in my mind,the reason i didn't have friends was not because i was a person people did not want to be friends with,but because people just weren't  awesome enough to be my friends. Basically i placed myself on a pedastool and looked down at my peers like a bunch of "not smart enough to be Ephy's friend" peasants.

I only started realizing that i was an utter jerk when ,in first year of varsity, i was skating around with one of buddies,so he did his awesome trick and i asked him to teach it to me. He demonstrated to me how to do and when i tried doing it,i did not land it properly,so instead of asking him to show me again how to do it,i told him that he sucks at doing the trick (yup,i told the guy who showed me how to do the trick that he did know how to do the trick). Pissed,my friend simply told me "you an asshole Ephy,just admit that you don't know how to kick flip and stop blaming me." I was offended,very offended.Me?Asshole?the audacity of that guy,so i stormed off of the court,sending a few expletives in his direction. For the next couple of days,i waited for an apology from my fiend but it never came so, for a change,i sat back and tried to figure out why this peasant was not realizing the wrong he did to me. And that is when i had the revelation,"Ephraim,maybe you are not right all the time.maybe sometimes you are the one in the wrong",and from then on,i started being less of an asshole and i did apologize to my friend.

Difficult as it is to do in most situations,i learnt that it is ok (and necessary) to admit being wrong sometimes. You cannot be right and other people wrong in every single situation that you find yourself in. Admitting that you are wrong is not a sign of stupidity or weak character,it is you willing to learn more than what you already know and being more accommodating to ideas and opinions which are not your own. After all,the world does not revolve around you and your opinions only. Like Mark Manson said,if it always seems like its you against the world in most situations you find yourself in,then there is a high probability that you are the one in the wrong.

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