On knowing you could be wrong

 There’s something that affects both smart and stupid people alike. Everyone thinks they’re right. 

They may be, but they could also be wrong.

On top of that, believing that you’re always right tends to be a hallmark of people who aren’t as smart as they think they are.

Now, I’m not saying that being right is wrong (pun intended), if you have the expertise and experience to make certain claims, if it’s an area that you’ve studied a lot in and know for sure you’ve learned from the authoritative resources (books, articles, official learning resources) and not something someone said on a YouTube video that you take for authority because they have many followers, then yes feel free to insist on your points of view on a subject.

But even then, it’s also a hallmark of intelligence that you consider you COULD be wrong. That what you think you know, maybe you don’t. That what you’ve learned, that could be the sum of the bodies of knowledge of the past, may have been debunked by new facts that you’re unaware of and someone else is.

Personally, and as a leader of others, I relentlessly ask my teams to tell me where I’m wrong. I know I tend to speak in authoritative ways (it’s just how I communicate), but with my teams I like to end whenever I’m challenging a certain issue, for people to tell where I’m wrong or what I’m failing to consider. This doesn’t make me dumb or ignorant. It makes me a leader who’s willing to listen and be challenged, because none of us are smarter than all of us.

So, Rafael, you have a tendency to think and believe you know everything and react poorly when someone tells you’re incorrect. That’s a closed mindset that is not congruent with continual growth and improvement. The more you can open yourself to the possibility that you could be wrong, that there are things you can learn even in subjects you believe you know a lot about, the more you’ll be able to get better at everything. Humans can’t learn things they think they already know, so having a starting point considering you could be wrong about anything and everything, is the best way to ensure you never stop learning and never stop getting better