Fear of Being Wrong

“Is it worse,” my distant acquaintance asked, “to fail at something or never attempt it in the first case?” I felt convicted by the question, because I’m frequently guilty of punting indefinitely on trying new and important actions. I have countless unfinished art projects, so many manuscripts waiting for my hand to complete them, so many tools I’ve purchased but never used, because on some level, failure is a terrible consequence. Something to avoid at all costs.

We avoid attempting things because, in the near term, failure is the worse consequence. But, because failures are often the building blocks of success, in the long term, avoiding the attempt is worse. So I guess it depends on your perspective.

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) May 16, 2022

It’s easy to rationalize this outcome. It’s downright cliché to laugh about former “gifted” children who translate into frustrated, timid adults. Even Malcolm Gladwell writes that people deemed “geniuses” by our academic establishment only sometimes live up to their potential; great success in life and career tends to follow those who face obstacles, not those to whom school comes easy. We former “gifted” kids become averse to setbacks.

But I feel something more particular occurring here. Something closer to my spiritual core. As stated in my response to my acquaintance’s question, avoiding trying something means protecting myself from the disgrace of being wrong. It’s much harder to determine where I acquired this paralyzing fear of being wrong, and therefore, it’s much harder to shake the fear and progress into being able to accomplish goals without fear of judgment.

Sometimes I fall into the temptation of blaming outside forces. That temptation is easy because it isn’t entirely wrong. Teachers correct students’ mistakes in crowded classrooms, in front of peers eager to leap on weakened classmate like leopards on a wounded gazelle. As Dana Goldstein writes, American-style classroom learning is cost-effective, but not necessarily pedagogically effective. Therefore teacher-blaming is tempting, if facile.

I also sometimes recall my father’s instructional technique of public callouts. He loved correcting me in front of friends and family for every minor mistake. As a teenager, I became reluctant to do anything with him until after I’d thoroughly mastered all relevant skills, for fear of public callouts. This behavior was also gendered: he regularly called me out in front of women, but never corrected my sister similarly. I suspect he thought this toughened me up.

But these explanations are unsatisfying. Classroom embarrassment and public callouts are techniques as old as formalized education, and many people emerge unscathed. The problem isn’t that these things happened, it’s my reaction to them. Instead of learning to accept these behaviors as events that ordinarily happen, I internalized them, made them part of my identity. My life’s purpose became not accomplishing goals, but avoiding being wrong.

Perhaps it’s because I was able to read at an unusually early age. Because I’d already spent years reading recreationally before beginning grade school, I talked in complete sentences and with adult grammar. This, combined with my being unusually tall, possibly made adult authority figures mistake me for older than I really was, an expectation I then tried to live up to, acting adult and well-informed before giving myself permission to be young and make mistakes.

Except oops, there I go again, blaming others.

Whatever the reason, from an early age, I learned to associate being wrong with losing face. Getting corrected wasn’t an opportunity to improve in the future, it was always read as a callout for being wrong in the past. Therefore I became invested, not in improving my upcoming responses, but in defending my previous errors. And the surest way to avoid wasting time on old errors, was to ensure I never committed them.

This fear isn’t entirely unjustified. We’ve all known somebody who becomes deeply invested in some esoteric pursuit that others don’t understand, and becomes exceptionally good at it: hard science, for instance, or art. The crowds often handle these people by mocking them. Not only for being quirky “nerds” in their learning, but also, even especially, when they become accomplished and bank everything on wrong ideas. Remember cold fusion?

In other words, we treat those who are wrong as having wasted their lives. We subject them to ridicule, tearing down whatever accomplishments they actually achieved to justify shaming their mistakes. The gifted few are immune to such judgments, shrugging off mistakes as learning opportunities for future learning. But that wasn’t me; I cared what others thought. I learned instead to avoid being judged by avoiding being wrong.

I’m still deciding where to go from here. Reaching this point hasn’t given me insights into correcting this trend. But by naming the effect, by explaining why being wrong hurts, maybe I can plan my next steps.