Two Ways To Be Wrong

Everyone makes mistakes. What separates people is what happens next.

There is a sentence I hear more often than I would like. It makes me cringe, actually.

“I have done it this way for twenty-five years and nothing bad has ever happened.”

The person saying it is usually explaining a mistake. Not a small one. Something they have gotten wrong for a very long time, confidently, without interruption. And when I, a colleague, or a friend points it out, that sentence is the shield. Twenty-five years. Or thirty, or forty, or ten. No problems. Case closed.

Here is what that sentence actually means. It means they have done it wrong for however many years and have never been checked. That is not the same as being right. It is the same as being lucky. The two feel identical from the inside, which is exactly the problem.

I could fill this piece with examples of ridiculous tax positions people have held for decades, the erroneous Schedule C to ‘fix an issue’ that has never once been questioned because it has never once been examined. But the more I sit with it, the more I realize the tax part is incidental. The defect is not professional. It is human.

There is a comfortable story people tell about mistakes. That the careful ones do not make them, and the sloppy ones do, and you can tell which is which by the mistake itself.

It is a nice story. It is also wrong.

Everyone makes mistakes. The careful and the sloppy, the expert and the novice, the person with forty years in and the person on their first day. The mistake is not the thing that separates them. What separates them is what happens next.

Because there are two ways to be wrong.

The first way is to be wrong and never find out. To do a thing incorrectly for twenty-five years, protected by the fact that nobody with the standing to correct you ever looked. This is the preparer with the erroneous Schedule C. It is also, if we are honest, most of us about most things. We hold beliefs we have never tested, repeat facts we have never checked, run processes we inherited from someone who inherited them from someone else, and we call the absence of consequences proof that we were right all along. We were not right. We were unexamined. There is a difference, and the difference is luck.

The second way is to be wrong, find out, and own it completely. This one is rarer, and it is the entire point.

What owning it actually looks like

Yesterday, Nina Totenberg, a journalist I have admired for a long time (and still do), made a mistake.

I have followed her reporting for years, the way you follow someone whose work taught you how to understand a thing you care about. Her memoir about her decades-long friendship with the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dinners with Ruth, sits on my shelf. So when I say I felt for this reporter, I mean it.

She misheard a single word leaving the courtroom. Missed the “s” at the end of it. And on the strength of that one unheard consonant, she reported that a Supreme Court justice was retiring when he was not. A small, human, entirely ordinary error, of the kind anyone who has ever moved too fast will recognize.

Then she did the thing you are supposed to do. She owned it completely. In a message to Justice Alito, she called it the worst professional mistake of a fifty-year career, said it was entirely her fault and no one else’s, and personally apologized. She went on the air and said the same thing to the public. No hedging. No blaming the process. No “mistakes were made” in the passive voice that lets everyone off the hook.

That is the harder path, and almost nobody takes it cleanly. When we are caught out, the reflex is to minimize, to contextualize, to find the technicality that makes it not quite our fault. She did none of that. She questioned herself, out loud, and corrected the record. That is not a weakness. That is the strongest thing a person can do when they have gotten something wrong, and it is strong precisely because it is so rare.

And a certain kind of person could not wait to pile on. The mockery was instant. Her age became the weapon of choice, as if being in her eighties were the crime rather than mishearing a word. The people sharpening those knives were not doing the hard thing. They were doing the easy, pleasurable thing that hides its mediocrity behind a costume of rigor.

Here is what I want you to see. Owning a mistake and mocking one are opposites, and they come from opposite places. Owning it is aimed inward, and it costs you something. You have to admit you were the one who was wrong, and then you have to say so, in public, with your name on it. Mockery is aimed only outward. It costs nothing. It produces a small warm hit of superiority and requires no examination of anything, least of all yourself.

The person dunking on someone else’s honest mistake is not the sharp one in the room. They are the twenty-five-year preparer pointed in a flattering direction, still refusing to ask a hard question about themselves. They have simply found a way to feel correct without ever having to be examined. It is the same failure as the first. It just looks like confidence instead of stubbornness.

People make mistakes. People fix them and move on. That is not the failure. That is the process working. The failure is the refusal to examine, whether it shows up as the person who never checks their own work or the crowd that would rather laugh than look.

I reached out to Ms. Totenberg to express my support and did not expect a reply. I got one.

The only thing I want you to take from this

There are two ways to be wrong, and you get to choose which way you are.

You can be the person who has done it this way for twenty-five years, protected by luck, calling the absence of a consequence a verdict of innocence. Or you can be the person who checks, catches it, and says so plainly when it is your turn to be wrong. Because it will be your turn. It is everyone’s turn eventually. The only question is what you do when you get there.

And extend that same standard to other people, because the day is coming when you will need it extended to you. The person who owns their own mistakes, who checks their own work first, is also the person best equipped to be gentle with someone else’s. They know how easy it is to miss the “s.” They have missed it themselves.

So the next time you catch yourself reaching for the shield, the twenty-five years, the nothing-bad-has-happened, the it-is-not-really-my-fault, stop. Ask the harder question. Was I right, or was I just never checked?

And the next time you watch someone else own a mistake the way it is supposed to be owned, cleanly, completely, with their name on it, do not reach for the knife.

One day, the mistake is yours, and you will remember who did not reach for theirs.