It sounds like a goddamn surrender, doesn’t it? A white flag waved over the battlefield of your own convictions. They sell you this idea from the day you’re born that the whole point of the game is to be right. Your parents, your teachers, your drill sergeants, your bosses, your goddamn wife… they all want you to have the right answers, the right opinions, the right goddamn brand of toilet paper.
Being right is a fortress. A clean, well-lit, and completely soul-crushing prison of your own making. You build the walls high, you put concertina wire on top, and you sit inside, safe and sound, with all your beautiful, correct, and completely dead ideas. And you spend your whole goddamn life defending those walls, shooting at anyone who even dares to lob a new thought over the side.
You see them everywhere, the prisoners of “right.” They’re the political fanatics, screaming at the television, their faces all twisted and red, absolutely certain that their team has all the answers and the other team is a bunch of evil, stupid bastards. They’re the religious zealots, with their clean suits and their dead eyes, so sure of their ticket to paradise that they’d burn the whole goddamn world down just to prove their point. They’re the know-it-alls at the end of the bar, the ones who can tell you the batting average of some forgotten baseball player from 1972 but can’t tell you the last time they felt a single, honest-to-God emotion.
They are all terrified.
That’s the secret, isn’t it? The desperate, pathetic, and completely all-consuming need to be right is just a symptom of a much deeper sickness: the terror of being wrong. Because if you’re wrong about one thing, just one little thing, then the whole goddamn fortress might come tumbling down. If you’re wrong about your politics, then maybe you’ve been a fool your whole life. If you’re wrong about your god, then maybe you’re just a dying animal on a spinning rock, with no one to hear your prayers. If you’re wrong about your wife, then maybe those twenty years of quiet, simmering misery weren’t a noble sacrifice; maybe they were just a goddamn waste of time.
To be wrong is to be vulnerable. It’s to be human. And in a world that’s constantly trying to turn you into a machine, being human is the most dangerous goddamn thing you can be.
I learned this the hard way, of course. I’ve been wrong more times than I’ve been right. I was a Mormon once, a good little soldier in God’s army. I was right. I had the answers. I had the clean, simple, and completely bullshit blueprint for the entire universe. And then one day, I woke up and realized I was living in a cage made of holy underwear and quiet desperation. I had to admit I was wrong. And it almost killed me.
Then I became the opposite. The drunken, brawling, millionaire bastard. The Tony Soprano of the tequila business. And I was right then, too. I knew how the world worked. It was all about power, and money, and taking what you wanted. I was a king of a beautiful, rotten, and completely empty kingdom. And then I hit the bottom, a quiet, ugly, and completely honest bottom, and I realized I was wrong again.
Being comfortable with being wrong isn’t about being a goddamn doormat. It’s not about having no opinions. It’s the opposite. It’s the quiet, beautiful, and completely badass strength of a man who has decoupled his ego from his ideas. It’s the understanding that your opinions are not you. They’re just tools. And sometimes, a tool gets dull, or it breaks, and you have to have the good goddamn sense to throw it away and pick up a new one.
The man who is comfortable with being wrong is the only man who is still alive. He’s the only one who’s still learning, still growing, still capable of being surprised by the beautiful, ugly, and completely unpredictable business of being a human being. He can sit at a bar and listen to some loudmouth spout his bullshit, and he can just smile and say, “You might be right,” and order another drink, because his peace of mind isn’t tied to winning some stupid, meaningless argument. He can be in bed with a woman, and in the middle of a fight, he can stop and say, “You know what? I was a fucking asshole. I was wrong.” And in that one, small, beautiful act of surrender, he wins the whole goddamn war.
The world is full of brittle, hollow men who would rather die than admit they made a mistake. They are the living dead. Their bodies are still walking around, but their souls have been in the ground for years, buried under a tombstone that reads, “Here Lies a Man Who Was Always Right.”
So you have to make a choice.
Do you want to be a fortress, or do you want to be a river?
A fortress is safe. It’s predictable. It never changes. And it’s a goddamn prison.
A river, a river is a beautiful, messy, and completely uncontrollable thing. It doesn’t argue with the rocks; it just flows around them. It’s not afraid of changing its course. It’s not afraid of being wrong. It just keeps moving, cutting a new path through the dirt, always on its way to the great, beautiful, and completely unknowable ocean.
That’s what it means to be comfortable with being wrong.
It means you’re still moving. It means you’re still free.
And in a world that’s trying to nail your feet to the floor, that’s the only goddamn victory that matters.
