Edition #29

Read Time: 3 Minutes

Hi All!

Here is your weekly serving of practical guidance and inspiration to ensure you live your life with purpose. Feel free to forward this along to friends and family. Enjoy!

Breaking the Fear of Being Wrong

You’re back in high school.

You have a vocabulary quiz tomorrow that you haven’t studied for.

So you decide to spend an hour drilling these meaningless words and definitions into your head.

You head to school the next morning, do another 20 minutes of refreshers and crank out a 90% on the quiz.

The next day?

You couldn’t tell me what the hell ‘Defenestrate’ means (if you are curious, it means throwing a person or thing out of a window. You probably want to defenestrate your vocab book right about now).

And why would you need to remember it? The quiz is over, you got your grade and you’re always gonna say ‘throw out the window’ instead of Defenestrate.

In the eyes of the education system, you were right. You got the right answers, well done.

But you learned absolutely nothing.

Life and society are built this way.

They demand that you provide the singular right answer they are looking for or else you’re wrong.

And if you don’t, they shame you for being wrong.

None of us want to feel shame, so we conform.

But what if there was another way?

What if instead of conforming to the ‘this-is-the-only-way-to-do-it’ (see we can create our own vocab words too) type of thinking, we actually embraced being wrong?

What if you made mistakes without the fear of being shamed for it?

I think this is exactly what we all have to do in order to live life to the fullest.

Give up the fear.

That fear bounds you.

It holds you in its clutches and prevents you from thinking for yourself.

If you allow yourself to be wrong — to make mistakes and try new things — you open up a whole new form of freedom in your life.

No one learned anything meaningful through memorization.

They learned it through discovery and exploration.

This can be you!

But only if you are willing to break down the fear of being seen differently.

Being seen as the risk-taker, the one who is willing to step out of bounds to find that there is a whole nother side of life you’ve been missing by staying within the lines.

Look, I’m not telling you to go jump off cliffs or swim with sharks (unless of course that is your thing) but I am asking you to take yourself a little less seriously.

Maybe you have an idea you want to explore, a method you want to try, or simply an instinct you want to follow.

But with no guarantee of you being right, you’ve decided it’s best to play it safe. And do nothing.

No more of that!

It is only through this trial and error, exploring your curiosities, that you can find the missing pieces to the puzzle you are trying to solve — be it a skill you are trying to develop or moving to a city you always thought would be cool to live in.

Life is about so much more than being right.

Life is about expanding and evolving — it’s about becoming more than you are right now.

To do this, you must embrace the freedom of being wrong now and again.

It will open up space for new ideas to replace old ones.

To see new perspectives.

To learn and grow.

To treat those with whom you do not see eye-to-eye with greater respect and realize, you may just be able to learn something from them.

So, my friends, go wander into the unknown.

Maybe you’ll be wrong.

But maybe, just maybe, it might be the best decision you ever made.

Words of Wisdom

You can complement this weekly newsletter with short reminders, ideas, and thoughts about personal development by following me on 𝕏.

Thanks for reading! And always remember…

Slow and steady. Never Idle.

Until next week,

Austin Sargent