​WHAT DOES IT COST TO BE WRONG?

By Moe Lastfogel
Director of Sales and Marketing for The Retail Observer

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Moe Lastfogel

Often, the cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing In business, you are taught that every decision and move your company makes will have financial implications. Those decisions, if not carefully made, could set a dire course for the fate of your company. Therefore, it is perceived that there is a high cost for being wrong, so often times business owners live in that fear every day.

However, being wrong is actually an essential part of learning. We get scared because we fear the cost of experimenting. Part of this is that we don’t often realize how cheap it is to test most of our ideas. But the bigger problem with experimenting is psychological – the realization that we might be wrong.

Kathryn Shulz, author of Being Wrong, explains why this is such a problem for many people: “In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity, but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. In this rather despairing view – and it is a common one – our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings. Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition... Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.”

At what stage in our life did we start believing that we need to be perfect at everything we do? That we need to achieve our goals without failure, without challenges and without everything going according to plan?

In the real world, we need to be wrong, not deterred, just wrong sometimes.

We need to take risks, put ourselves out there, live on the edge, and try things that we will not master upon our first attempt. We need to push our comfort zones to get ahead.

In other words, being wrong is the most beneficial and natural way to learn, not only in our personal lives but in the business world as well.

Happily Wrong (sometimes),
Moe Lastfogel
​moe@retailobserver.com

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