Today, I have someone else’s article I would like you to read first.

I stumbled on this article while trying to find some information about confirmation bias and admitting you are wrong. I will be honest, I have never heard the phrase “intellectual humility” before, but I definitely am familiar with the concept. Simply put, intellectual humility would be your ability to admit you are wrong. Can you be vulnerable? Can you admit you need to know more information? Can you admit that your knowledge may fall short of the task at hand? I believe these are really important practices to build stronger relationships with those around us.

Think about your first day at a new job. Let’s say you have always been an interior painter. Things at home have been tough and you need more money, so you expand your company to do both interior and exterior painting. The basic principles of both jobs are the same – steady hand around the edges, and longer strokes as you fill in the wall. However, you now need to learn which exterior materials can and can’t be painted, which paints will produce the best color over time, which paint brands have formulas that stand up to the ocean air, thunderstorms, hurricanes, dust storms, whatever the task at hand. As the professional, you have to answer those questions for your client. You won’t be perfect right away. One brand doesn’t produce enough coverage without 4 coats. Another dried and cracked, flaking off in the windy heat. The house you painted on the coast is visibly melting as the humidity increases into the summer. You were an expert at interior painting, clean, quick, reliable. You can’t lose your reputation, so what do you do?

If you are a smart business man, you would admit to those clients that you made a mistake in your product choices. You promise to come back and do a better job, then you get to work. Whether they decide they want you to work on it or not, a lesson was learned. If you don’t do it right the first time, you aren’t guaranteed a second chance. But you can still do it right the first time, for your next client. Now you identify exactly what you did wrong, You got the right paint color for each house, but not the right formula. Next time you buy paint, you bring labels to ID which buckets go to which jobsite.

For all of that to happen, you had to admit that you were wrong about some aspect of the job. The first step toward solving a problem is identifying that there is a problem. That is why when you go see the doctor, they have an escalating scale of tests to identify what the problem is. They have to use more and more precision to dial in to what disorder, item, intruder, injury is the root of the problem.

You cannot problem solve without identifying it. You also can’t solve a problem without understanding it. This is where my entire issue with male politicians legislating on women’s rights comes from. Those men in Congress cannot comprehend the lives of the women around them. I would love to ask these adults, so worried about the bodies of trans teens, to explain why they so deeply hate something they just don’t understand.

For millennia, humans couldn’t comprehend the expanses of space, the shape of the Earth, or that the sun doesn’t orbit the Earth. Now, mankind has walked on the moon, sent telescopic cameras to the edge of the universe, taken images of the exterior of our planet, we fly through the sky for leisure, and know there are 4,000 stars visible to the naked eye, with their own solar systems. We have gathered so much information, and as a species, are learning more about humanity every day. Therefore, if we are consistently expanding our knowledge, why continue to be resistant to positive change? We have debunked so many myths about our own existence, and it is infantile to live in ignorance of scientific consensus. If you are not an expert in something, listen to the facts presented to you. You shouldn’t claim to be an economist when you never passed a high school math class.

Sources Cited:

Suttie, J., Psy. D. (2022, June 27). The Upside to Admitting You Were Wrong Online. Greater Good. Retrieved May 21, 2025, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_upside_to_admitting_you_were_wrong_online#thank-influence