We live in a world with billions of people who make mistakes. Every day we encounter different experiences that we don’t know how to approach. When we deal with these problems, we believe that our viewpoints are right but what we believe may be wrong. When someone tells us that we did something wrong, some people may try to avoid being wrong and some may admit that they are wrong. We are humans, it is normal for us to have these flaws, however, a problem starts to arise when we get too caught up about wanting to be right about everything.

Kathryn Schulz was the speaker who talked about her ideas on being wrong. In the TED talk “Being wrong”, Ms. Schulz informs us with three reasons why she thinks it is a problem that we as people are always trapped in this feeling of being right about everything. This is because the feeling of being right has a correlation to the feeling of being wrong. There is a difference between feeling wrong and realizing that you are wrong. When you realize that you are wrong you feel embarrassed, ignorant, and distressed, etc. Whereas, the feeling of being wrong feels like being right. There is a structural reason and a cultural reason to why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness, Ms. Schulz calls this process error blindness. The structural reason for this is because nobody really realizes when they are wrong about something until it’s already too late to realize that they were wrong. The cultural reason for this issue is that we get frightened when we get something wrong; which gives us the intention that when we get something wrong, there’s something wrong with us. Thus, we assume that we are right, so we can feel knowledgeable.

Based on Ms. Schulz ideas she believes that being in the mindset of always being right is a problem. People believe in different ideas and when those ideas are contradicting each other we assume that the person disagreeing with us is ignorant. However, when the people that disagree share the same facts that we do, we think that they are smart, or they know the truth but wants to purposefully distort and disagree with the idea. It is possible to step outside of the feeling of being right by doing something that happens instead. By doing so we need to step out of our comfort zone and the place of rightness to rediscover that it is okay to say that you are wrong.

Reflecting on my eighteen years, I have made many mistakes and had many wrong viewpoints. There was one experience that I had last year in high school. It was the first day of school my friends and I were walking to class and a freshman girl asked us where the North Wing was. After I gave her the directions she left with a relieved look on her face, that’s when my friend and I realized that we just gave the girl the wrong direction. Looking back to this story always gives me a big laugh because as a senior who has been in the school for four years, you would think that we would know our way around, but instead, we gave the girl the wrong direction. Another example would be Dora the Explorer, there is a sly fox named Swiper that prevents Dora and Boots from what they must do. Swiper knows that is wrong to steal but still has the audacity to commit to it, until Dora says “Swiper no swiping” three times, that is when he realizes that he is doing something wrong. Situations like this happen all the time, it’s just whether you realize and admit that you were wrong, or you still perceive that you are right about everything.

Ms. Schulz delivered her ideas in a creative way by using rhetorical situations. Some rhetorical situations that were used are purpose, genre, and exigence. The purpose of the TED talk was to think about what happens when we are wrong and why we shouldn’t have the perception of always being right. The genre could be interpreted in different writing styles. First, she engages her listeners’ attention by including a personal story; then she informs us about the ideas of being wrong. Ms. Schulz wanted to address three issues which are why we get stuck in this conscious of being right, why perceiving to be right is a problem and sometimes we must step out the view of being right and say that it is okay to be wrong.

As we live our lives, we will continue to make the wrong approaches when doing things, which is why we try to avoid these types of situations. Nobody likes to say or think that they are wrong because it makes us look ignorant. Instead of being stuck in the mindset of rightness, try to transform these ideas and say that it is okay to be wrong. These problems will benefit us in the future so that we don’t make the same mistakes.