The Right to be Wrong

I’ve been thinking a lot about right answers recently. In high school the world revolves around the right answers. We are trained, even before that, that right answers get you ahead. The best perks are saved for those of us who can figure out how to translate their right answers into tenths and hundredths of points of a GPA. Those people are the ones who are going to succeed in life. Or at least that is what we are told.

I chose to go to a college that didn’t have grades. New College of Florida was my absolute utopia for four years and I scoff at the day that I thought I wanted to go to “big state university far from home.” I can’t speak for other people’s college experience, but at least at mine, I started to develop the concept that right answers get you somewhere, but your wrong answers are valuable too. Instead of grades, we had evaluations that told us what we did well and what we could work on. So while I was learning from my wrong answers, the right answers still prevailed as a goal- something to achieve.

Being the super-student that I am, I continued on to graduate school in a field that I didn’t know about in a place where I didn’t know anyone. Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design was my all-encompassing life for over two years. The most important thing I learned there is that there are no answers. Not only were my ‘right’ answers not getting me anywhere, I was struggling to figure out what my ‘wrong’ answers were teaching me. This was where life broke down. I had always been strong, confident, independent…and suddenly I found myself losing identity and fumbling with a direction. I hit the crisis hard. It was probably a year into my quarter-life crisis that I learned that someone had defined this part of my experience and that other people were going through it too. While it was a comfort to know others out there felt like me, a concept that I couldn’t even imagine, it didn’t make my lack of answers any easier.

I started business school last summer. I like to think that business school saved my life. I certainly am not out of the clear of my crisis- but I have gained a paradigm shift about answers that has made things easier. Rather than right answers, or learning from mistakes, or wandering aimlessly- I just make the answer up. In almost every business class that I have taken, as long as you can just justify your answer, it is a right one. Sure, there is a right way to figure out compound interest or a way to exchange foreign currency, but if you have a variation on some process or, hell, even make up something new, there is someone willing to listen to your answer and, in most cases, tell you that you are right. There is a power to being able to argue your way into being right. It has given me strength and hope that when I don’t know what step is next in my life or where the hell my emotions are going to take me next, that it’s not going to be an issue of right or wrong. It is going to be an issue of making it up and being ok with that answer being right- even if the rest of the world wants to argue that it is wrong.