The lurking fear of being incorrect
You hear what you think would be an excellent opportunity to expand on a stated topic. You think on it for a second, but somewhere on that, you freeze. You’ve imagine how appalling it would be if your opportunity to share what you believe would be significant knowledge, has the potential to be anything else. You then fixate at how the people in the room would respond to it. This moment can be equated to falling from a mountain or into a chasm, or… something. But you choose to speak up; your heart is thumping, your hands jittering but not too noticeably as there are people watching. You answer and you’re immediately corrected. You sink in your seat, try your very best to pretend it never happened…
^now that’s always a possibility but what if the opposite occurs? Give yourself a chance.
What spurs this?— well, the mere fact that a lot of us are actually afraid of being wrong. In my opinion, it is mostly due to public reaction. Now, this isn’t to encourage negative behavior, but to highlight that we’ve accepted the notion that being wrong is not okay. This reminds me of a very significant statement: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A STUPID QUESTION! It feels so good to even think this.
Sometimes you ask a ‘q’ and people react in an unpleasant way - depending on what you consider ‘unpleasant’. When we think of the word ‘question’, we don’t usually think ‘stupid’, right? We may instead think ‘curious’ or ‘answer’. Sometimes people want things clarified, they want to make sure they understand something and what they’re thinking is not merely a non-existent idea… so they ask… to confirm!! Other times, it could be that they actually don’t know, or they’ve forgotten something and need to learn or be reminded of it. No one should be shamed for this. You may not like it, but hey, questions don’t usually leave till they get a response, so why not answer it? What happened to ‘no knowledge is ever wasted’?
To explain further, I’d like to highlight the following quote: “You can only be ignorant once.” (thanks Yewande ;)
I noticed there’s often a discouraging attitude towards asking and responding to (certain types of) questions. Okay, some questions are glaringly inappropriate - this is not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about general curiosity resulting in obvious, non-inappropriate questions, like if a topic was brought up or you’d like a personal answer or at least not a google answer. Tone is important when asking questions, especially if it’s about sensitive topics; how you ask the question matters just as much as what you ask.
If you say something society has deemed “wrong”, you risk being ‘canceled’ or ostracized - this happens too often to ignore on social media especially. The thing is once you’re ignorant about something, and you ask about it or look it up, the ignorance is no more because you’re now informed about it. That’s the beauty of knowing.
There’s this idea that only *some people can be ignorant. Not true. We all have it in us to be ignorant because we don’t have all the answers, we don’t know everything, and people have a natural tendency to assume. It’s by assuming and getting things wrong that can eventually lead us to the right answers. Why don’t we acknowledge this enough?
Okay, no one likes to look ridiculous, I get that. We all want to appear like we know what’s up, especially if we believe a lot of people in the room are pretty knowledgeable. But if we all do this, who then makes a case for knowledge and curiosity, who then gains? If we’re wrong, we get corrected, depending on the situation, there may be consequences in between, but that’s arguably part of being corrected. Or is this really too idealistic to be accepted?!
