CHAPTER 6 
 
You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I) 
 
Five hundred years ago cartographers believed that California was an island. Doc- 
tors believed that slicing a person’s arm open (or causing bleeding anywhere) 
could cure disease. Scientists believed that fire was made out of something called 
phlogiston. Women believed that rubbing dog urine on their face had anti-aging 
benefits. Astronomers believed that the sun revolved around the earth. 
When I was a little boy, I used to think “mediocre” was a kind of vegetable that I 
didn’t want to eat. I thought my brother had found a secret passageway in my 
grandmother’s house because he could get outside without having to leave the 
bathroom (spoiler alert: there was a window). I also thought that when my friend 
and his family visited “Washington, B.C.,” they had somehow traveled back in time 
to when the dinosaurs lived, because after all, “B.C.” was a long time ago. 
As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth 
was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without my even 
knowing. I thought happiness was a destiny and not a choice. I thought love was 
something that just happened, not something that you worked for. I thought being 
“cool” had to be practiced and learned from others, rather than invented for one- 
self. 
When I was with my first girlfriend, I thought we would be together forever. And 
then, when that relationship ended, I thought I’d never feel the same way about a 
woman again. And then when I felt the same way about a woman again, I thought 

that love sometimes just wasn’t enough. And then I realized that each individual 
gets to decide what is “enough,” and that love can be whatever we let it be. 
Every step of the way I was wrong. About everything. Throughout my life, I’ve 
been flat-out wrong about myself, others, society, culture, the world, the uni- 
verse—every-thing. 
And I hope that will continue to be the case for the rest of my life. 
Just as Present Mark can look back on Past Mark’s every flaw and mistake, one 
day Future Mark will look back on Present Mark’s assumptions (including the con- 
tents of this book) and notice similar flaws. And that will be a good thing. Because 
that will mean I have grown. 
There’s a famous Michael Jordan quote about him failing over and over and 
over again, and that’s why he succeeded. Well, I’m always wrong about everything, 
over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves. 
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we 
don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. 
And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly 
less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong than that, and so on. We are al- 
ways in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever 
reaching truth or perfection. 
We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, 
we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a 
little less wrong tomorrow. 
When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite 
scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that 

other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and 
thought patterns are our data. 
There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your expe- 
rience has shown you to be right for you—and even then, that experience is prob- 
ably somewhat wrong too. And because you and I and everybody else all have dif- 
fering needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will all inevitably 
come to differing “correct” answers about what our lives mean and how they 
should be lived. My correct answer involves traveling alone for years on end, living 
in obscure places, and laughing at my own farts. Or at least that was the correct an- 
swer up until recently. That answer will change and evolve, because I change and 
evolve; and as I grow older and more experienced, I chip away at how wrong I am, 
becoming less and less wrong every day. 
Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they 
never end up actually living it. 
A certain woman is single and lonely and wants a partner, but she never gets 
out of the house and does anything about it. A certain man works his ass off and 
believes he deserves a promotion, but he never explicitly says that to his boss. 
They’re told that they’re afraid of failure, of rejection, of someone saying no. 
But that’s not it. Sure, rejection hurts. Failure sucks. But there are particular cer- 
tainties that we hold on to—certainties that we’re afraid to question or let go of, 
values that have given our lives meaning over the years. That woman doesn’t get 
out there and date because she would be forced to confront her beliefs about her 

own desirability. That man doesn’t ask for the promotion because he would have 
to confront his beliefs about what his skills are actually worth. 
It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that 
nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for 
sure. 
Beliefs of this sort—that I’m not attractive enough, so why bother; or that my 
boss is an asshole, so why bother—are designed to give us moderate comfort now 
by mortgaging greater happiness and success later on. They’re terrible long-term 
strategies, yet we cling to them because we assume we’re right, because we as- 
sume we already know what’s supposed to happen. In other words, we assume we 
know how the story ends. 
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already hap- 
pened—and even then, it’s still debatable. That’s why accepting the inevitable 
imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place. 
Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: 
doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the 
future may hold for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves. Instead 
of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the 
time. Because we are. 
Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the 
opportunity for growth. It means not cutting your arm open to cure a cold or 
splashing dog piss on your face to look young again. It means not thinking 

“mediocre” is a vegetable, and not being afraid to care about things. 
Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a 
positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful mo- 
ments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of 
the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting 
and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All 
that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s 
not worth much. 
Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I 
imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties 
today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They 
will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us 
most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will 
laugh at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at 
our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand 
truths about us of which none of us are yet aware. 
And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were. 

Architects of Our Own Beliefs 
Try this. Take a random person and put them in a room with some buttons to 
push. Then tell them that if they do something specific—some undefined some- 
thing that they have to figure out—a light will flash on indicating that they’ve won a 
point. Then tell them to see how many points they can earn within a thirty-minute 
period. 
When psychologists have done this, what happens is what you might expect. 
People sit down and start mashing buttons at random until eventually the light 
comes on to tell them they got a point. Logically, they then try repeating whatever 
they were doing to get more points. Except now the light’s not coming on. So they 
start experimenting with more complicated sequences—press this button three 
times, then this button once, then wait five seconds, and—ding! Another point. But 
eventually that stops working. Perhaps it doesn’t have to do with buttons at all, 
they think. Perhaps it has to do with how I’m sitting. Or what I’m touching. Maybe 
it has to do with my feet. Ding! Another point. Yeah, maybe it’s my feet and then I 
press another button. Ding! 
Generally, within ten to fifteen minutes each person has figured out the specific 
sequence of behaviors required to net more points. It’s usually something weird 
like standing on one foot or memorizing a long sequence of buttons pressed in a 
specific amount of time while facing a certain direction. 
But here’s the funny part: the points really are random. There’s no sequence; 
there’s no pattern. Just a light that keeps coming on with a ding, and people doing 

cartwheels thinking that what they’re doing is giving them points. 
Sadism aside, the point of the experiment is to show how quickly the human 
mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t 
real. And it turns out, we’re all really good at it. Every person leaves that room con- 
vinced that he or she nailed the experiment and won the game. They all believe that 
they discovered the “perfect” sequence of buttons that earned them their points. 
But the methods they come up with are as unique as the individuals themselves. 
One man came up with a long sequence of button-pushing that made no sense to 
anyone but himself. One girl came to believe that she had to tap the ceiling a cer- 
tain number of times to get points. When she left the room she was exhausted 
from jumping up and down. 
Our brains are meaning machines. What we understand as “meaning” is gener- 
ated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences. We 
press a button, then we see a light go on; we assume the button caused the light to 
go on. This, at its core, is the basis of meaning. Button, light; light, button. We see 
a chair. We note that it’s gray. Our brain then draws the association between the 
color (gray) and the object (chair) and forms meaning: “The chair is gray.” 
Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to 
help us understand and control the environment around us. Everything about our 
experiences, both external and internal, generates new associations and connec- 
tions within our minds. Everything from the words on this page, to the gram- 
matical concepts you use to decipher them, to the dirty thoughts your mind 

wanders into when my writing becomes boring or repetitive—each of these 
thoughts, impulses, and perceptions is composed of thousands upon thousands 
of neural connections, firing in conjunction, alighting your mind in a blaze of 
knowledge and understanding. 
But there are two problems. First, the brain is imperfect. We mistake things we 
see and hear. We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily. 
Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold 
on to that meaning. We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we 
don’t want to let go of it. Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we 
created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway. 
The comedian Emo Philips once said, “I used to think the human brain was the 
most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.” The 
unfortunate fact is, most of what we come to “know” and believe is the product of 
the innate inaccuracies and biases present in our brains. Many or even most of our 
values are products of events that are not representative of the world at large, or 
are the result of a totally misconceived past. 
The result of all this? Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all 
beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others. The human mind is a 
jumble of inaccuracy. And while this may make you uncomfortable, it’s an incred- 
ibly important concept to accept, as we’ll see. 

The Dangers of Pure Certainty 
Erin sits across from me at the sushi restaurant and tries to explain why she 
doesn’t believe in death. It’s been almost three hours, and she’s eaten exactly four 
cucumber rolls and drunk an entire bottle of sake by herself. (In fact, she’s about 
halfway through bottle number two now.) It’s four o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. 
I didn’t invite her here. She found out where I was via the Internet and flew out 
to come find me. 
Again. 
She’s done this before. You see, Erin is convinced that she can cure death, but 
she’s also convinced that she needs my help to do it. But not my help in like a 
business sense. If she just needed some PR advice or something, that would be 
one thing. No, it’s more than that: she needs me to be her boyfriend. Why? After 
three hours of questioning and a bottle and a half of sake, it still isn’t clear. 
My fiancée was with us in the restaurant, by the way. Erin thought it important 
that she be included in the discussion; Erin wanted her to know that she was “will- 
ing to share” me and that my girlfriend (now wife) “shouldn’t feel threatened” by 
her. 
I met Erin at a self-help seminar in 2008. She seemed like a nice enough per- 
son. A little bit on the woo-woo, New Agey side of things, but she was a lawyer and 
had gone to an Ivy League school, and was clearly smart. And she laughed at my 
jokes and thought I was cute—so, of course, knowing me, I slept with her. 
A month later, she invited me to uproot across the country and move in with 

her. This struck me as somewhat of a red flag, and so I tried to break things off 
with her. She responded by saying that she would kill herself if I refused to be with 
her. Okay, so make that two red flags. I promptly blocked her from my email and all 
my devices. 
This would slow her down but not stop her. 
Years before I met her, Erin had gotten into a car accident and nearly died. Actu- 
ally, she had medically “died” for a few moments—all brain activity had stopped— 
but she had somehow miraculously been revived. When she “came back,” she 
claimed everything had changed. She became a very spiritual person. She became 
interested in, and started believing in, energy healing and angels and universal con- 
sciousness and tarot cards. She also believed that she had become a healer and an 
empath and that she could see the future. And for whatever reason, upon meeting 
me, she decided that she and I were destined to save the world together. To “cure 
death,” as she put it. 
After I’d blocked her, she began to create new email addresses, sometimes 
sending me as many as a dozen angry emails in a single day. She created fake 
Facebook and Twitter accounts that she used to harass me as well as people close 
to me. She created a website identical to mine and wrote dozens of articles claim- 
ing that I was her ex-boyfriend and that I had lied to her and cheated her, that I had 
promised to marry her and that she and I belonged together. When I contacted her 
to take the site down, she said that she would take it down only if I flew to Cali- 
fornia to be with her. This was her idea of a compromise. 

And through all of this, her justification was the same: I was destined to be with 
her, that God had preordained it, that she literally woke up in the middle of the 
night to the voices of angels commanding that “our special relationship” was to be 
the harbinger of a new age of permanent peace on earth. (Yes, she really told me 
this.) 
By the time we were sitting in that sushi restaurant together, there had been 
thousands of emails. Whether I responded or didn’t respond, replied respectfully 
or replied angrily, nothing ever changed. Her mind never changed; her beliefs 
never budged. This had gone on for over seven years by then (and counting). 
And so it was, in that small sushi restaurant, with Erin guzzling sake and bab- 
bling for hours about how she’d cured her cat’s kidney stones with energy tapping, 
that something occurred to me: 
Erin is a self-improvement junkie. She spends tens of thousands of dollars on 
books and seminars and courses. And the craziest part of all this is that Erin 
embodies all the lessons she’s learned to a T. She has her dream. She stays persis- 
tent with it. She visualizes and takes action and weathers the rejections and failures 
and gets up and tries again. She’s relentlessly positive. She thinks pretty damn 
highly of herself. I mean, she claims to heal cats the same way Jesus healed 
Lazarus—come the fuck on. 
And yet her values are so fucked that none of this matters. The fact that she 
does everything “right” doesn’t make her right. 
There is a certainty in her that refuses to relinquish itself. She has even told me 

this in so many words: that she knows her fixation is completely irrational and un- 
healthy and is making both her and me unhappy. But for some reason it feels so 
right to her that she can’t ignore it and she can’t stop. 
In the mid-1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister began researching the concept 
of evil. Basically, he looked at people who do bad things and at why they do them. 
At the time it was assumed that people did bad things because they felt horrible 
about themselves—that is, they had low self-esteem. One of Baumeister’s first sur- 
prising findings was that this was often not true. In fact, it was usually the oppo- 
site. Some of the worst criminals felt pretty damn good about themselves. And it 
was this feeling good about themselves in spite of the reality around them that 
gave them the sense of justification for hurting and disrespecting others. 
For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they 
must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs 
and deservedness. Racists do racist things because they’re certain about their ge- 
netic superiority. Religious fanatics blow themselves up and murder dozens of 
people because they’re certain of their place in heaven as martyrs. Men rape and 
abuse women out of their certainty that they’re entitled to women’s bodies. 
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else 
is evil. 
In controversial experiments, now simply known as the Stanford Prison Exper- 
iment, organized by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, researchers told “normal” 
people that they were to punish other volunteers for breaking various rules. And 

punish them they did, sometimes escalating the punishment to the point of phys- 
ical abuse. Almost none of the punishers objected or asked for explanation. On the 
contrary, many of them seemed to relish the certainty of the moral righteousness 
bestowed upon them by the experiments. 
The problem here is that not only is certainty unattainable, but the pursuit of 
certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity. 
Many people have an unshakable certainty in their ability at their job or in the 
amount of salary they should be making. But that certainty makes them feel worse, 
not better. They see others getting promoted over them, and they feel slighted. 
They feel unappreciated and underacknowledged. 
Even a behavior as simple as sneaking a peek at your boyfriend’s text messages 
or asking a friend what people are saying about you is driven by insecurity and that 
aching desire to be certain. 
You can check your boyfriend’s text messages and find nothing, but that’s rarely 
the end of it; then you may start wondering if he has a second phone. You can feel 
slighted and stepped over at work to explain why you missed out on a promotion, 
but then that causes you to distrust your coworkers and second-guess everything 
they say to you (and how you think they feel about you), which in turn makes you 
even less likely to get promoted. You can keep pursuing that special someone 
you’re “supposed” to be with, but with each rebuffed advance and each lonely 
night, you only begin to question more and more what you’re doing wrong. 
And it’s in these moments of insecurity, of deep despair, that we become 

susceptible to an insidious entitlement: believing that we deserve to cheat a little to 
get our way, that other people deserve to be punished, that we deserve to take what 
we want, and sometimes violently. 
It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, 
the more uncertain and insecure you will feel. 
But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not 
knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know. 
Uncertainty removes our judgments of others; it preempts the unnecessary 
stereotyping and biases that we otherwise feel when we see somebody on TV, in 
the office, or on the street. Uncertainty also relieves us of our judgment of our- 
selves. We don’t know if we’re lovable or not; we don’t know how attractive we are; 
we don’t know how successful we could potentially become. The only way to 
achieve these things is to remain uncertain of them and be open to finding them 
out through experience. 
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the 
man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything 
without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the 
more opportunities we gain to learn. 
Our values are imperfect and incomplete, and to assume that they are perfect 
and complete is to put us in a dangerously dogmatic mindset that breeds enti- 
tlement and avoids responsibility. The only way to solve our problems is to first 
admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong and are not 

working. 
This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take 
place. 
Before we can look at our values and prioritizations and change them into bet- 
ter, healthier ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values. We must 
intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don’t fit in 
with much of the rest of the world, to stare our own ignorance in the face and con- 
cede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all. 

Manson’s Law of Avoidance 
Chances are you’ve heard some form of Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to 
fill up the time available for its completion.” 
You’ve also undoubtedly heard of Murphy’s law: “Whatever can go wrong will 
go wrong.” 
Well, next time you’re at a swanky cocktail party and you want to impress some- 
body, try dropping Manson’s law of avoidance on them: 
 
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. 
 
That means the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, 
how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself 
living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it. 
There’s a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. 
Anything that shakes up that comfort—even if it could potentially make your life 
better—is inherently scary. 
Manson’s law applies to both good and bad things in life. Making a million dol- 
lars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your money; becoming a 
famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much as losing your job. This 
is why people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re 
afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe themselves to be. 
You avoid writing that screenplay you’ve always dreamed of because doing so 

would call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster. You avoid 
talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because 
that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman. You 
avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him anymore because ending 
the friendship would conflict with your identity as a nice, forgiving person. 
These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because 
they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the 
values that we’ve chosen and have learned to live up to. 
I had a friend who, for the longest time, talked about putting his artwork online 
and trying to make a go of it as a professional (or at least semiprofessional) artist. 
He talked about it for years; he saved up money; he even built a few different web- 
sites and uploaded his portfolio. 
But he never launched. There was always some reason: the resolution on his 
work wasn’t good enough, or he had just painted something better, or he wasn’t in 
a position to dedicate enough time to it yet. 
Years passed and he never did give up his “real job.” Why? Because despite 
dreaming about making a living through his art, the real potential of becoming An 
Artist Nobody Likes was far, far scarier than remaining An Artist Nobody’s Heard 
Of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being An Artist Nobody’s Heard 
Of. 
I had another friend who was a party guy, always going out drinking and chas- 
ing girls. After years of living the “high life,” he found himself terribly lonely, 

depressed, and unhealthy. He wanted to give up his party lifestyle. He spoke with a 
fierce jealousy of those of us who were in relationships and more “settled down” 
than he was. Yet he never changed. For years he went on, empty night after empty 
night, bottle after bottle. Always some excuse. Always some reason he couldn’t 
slow down. 
Giving up that lifestyle threatened his identity too much. The Party Guy was all 
he knew how to be. To give that up would be like committing psychological hara- 
kiri. 
We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to 
them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don’t mean to, that’s how 
our brain is wired. As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already 
know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe I’m a nice guy, I’ll avoid situations 
that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll 
seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief al- 
ways takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe 
we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot 
change. 
In this way, “knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can 
cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can 
close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. 
I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what 
keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your 
judgments and accepting of the differences in others. 

Kill Yourself 
Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construc- 
tion and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary 
metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off 
letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you 
to not give a fuck. 
It sounds wonky, but there are some psychological benefits to this approach to 
life. When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free our- 
selves up to actually act (and fail) and grow. 
When someone admits to herself, “You know, maybe I’m not good at relation- 
ships,” then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no iden- 
tity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to 
herself. 
When the student admits to himself, “You know, maybe I’m not a rebel; maybe 
I’m just scared,” then he’s free to be ambitious again. He has no reason to feel 
threatened by pursuing his academic dreams and maybe failing. 
When the insurance adjuster admits to himself, “You know, maybe there’s 
nothing unique or special about my dreams or my job,” then he’s free to give that 
screenplay an honest go and see what happens. 
I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is 
unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating. 
There’s a kind of self-absorption that comes with fear based on an irrational 

certainty. When you assume that your plane is the one that’s going to crash, or that 
your project idea is the stupid one everyone is going to laugh at, or that you’re the 
one everyone is going to choose to mock or ignore, you’re implicitly telling your- 
self, “I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” 
This is narcissism, pure and simple. You feel as though your problems deserve 
to be treated differently, that your problems have some unique math to them that 
doesn’t obey the laws of the physical universe. 
My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in 
mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an 
undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or 
dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a 
partner, a friend, a creator. 
The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything 
will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most 
ordinary ways possible. 
This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re 
uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or espe- 
cially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up 
your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by 
this world. This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been 
sustaining yourself on for years. Like a junkie giving up the needle, you’re going to 
go through withdrawal when you start giving these things up. But you’ll come out 

the other side so much better. 

How to Be a Little Less Certain of Yourself 
Questioning ourselves and doubting our own thoughts and beliefs is one of the 
hardest skills to develop. But it can be done. Here are some questions that will 
help you breed a little more uncertainty in your life. 
 
Question #1: What if I’m wrong? 
A friend of mine recently got engaged to be married. The guy who proposed to 
her is pretty solid. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t hit her or mistreat her. He’s friend- 
ly and has a good job. 
But since the engagement, my friend’s brother has been admonishing her non- 
stop about her immature life choices, warning her that she’s going to hurt herself 
with this guy, that she’s making a mistake, that she’s being irresponsible. And 
whenever my friend asks her brother, “What is your problem? Why does this both- 
er you so much?” he acts as though there is no problem, that nothing about the en- 
gagement bothers him, that he’s just trying to be helpful and look out for his little 
sister. 
But it’s clear that something does bother him. Perhaps it’s his own insecurities 
about getting married. Perhaps it’s a sibling rivalry thing. Perhaps it’s jealousy. Per- 
haps he’s just so caught up in his own victimhood that he doesn’t know how to 
show happiness for others without trying to make them feel miserable first. 
As a general rule, we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves. When we’re 
angry, or jealous, or upset, we’re oftentimes the last ones to figure it out. And the 

only way to figure it out is to put cracks in our armor of certainty by consistently 
questioning how wrong we might be about ourselves. 
“Am I jealous—and if I am, then why?” “Am I angry?” “Is she right, and I’m just 
protecting my ego?” 
Questions like these need to become a mental habit. In many cases, the simple 
act of asking ourselves such questions generates the humility and compassion 
needed to resolve a lot of our issues. 
But it’s important to note that just because you ask yourself if you have the 
wrong idea doesn’t necessarily mean that you do. If your husband beats the crap 
out of you for burning the pot roast and you ask yourself if you’re wrong to believe 
he’s mistreating you—well, sometimes you’re right. The goal is merely to ask the 
question and entertain the thought at the moment, not to hate yourself. 
It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be 
wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that 
means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re 
able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change. 
 
Question #2: What would it mean if I were wrong? 
Many people are able to ask themselves if they’re wrong, but few are able to go 
the extra step and admit what it would mean if they were wrong. That’s because the 
potential meaning behind our wrongness is often painful. Not only does it call into 
question our values, but it forces us to consider what a different, contradictory 

value could potentially look and feel like. 
Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a 
thought without accepting it.” Being able to look at and evaluate different values 
without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing 
one’s own life in a meaningful way. 
As for my friend’s brother, his question to himself should be, “What would it 
mean if I were wrong about my sister’s wedding?” Often the answer to such a ques- 
tion is pretty straightforward (and some form of “I’m being a selfish/insecure/ 
nar-cissis- asshole”). If he is wrong, and his sister’s engagement is fine and healthy 
and happy, there’s really no way to explain his own behavior other than through his 
own insecurities and fucked-up values. He assumes that he knows what’s best for 
his sister and that she can’t make major life decisions for herself; he assumes that 
he has the right and responsibility to make decisions for her; he is certain that he’s 
right and everyone else must be wrong. 
Even once uncovered, whether in my friend’s brother or in ourselves, that sort 
of entitlement is hard to admit. It hurts. That’s why few people ask the difficult 
questions. But probing questions are necessary in order to get at the core prob- 
lems that are motivating his, and our, dickish behavior. 
 
Question #3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my 
current problem, for both myself and others? 
This is the litmus test for determining whether we’ve got some pretty solid 

values going on, or we’re totally neurotic fuckwads taking our fucks out on every- 
one, including ourselves. 
The goal here is to look at which problem is better. Because after all, as Disap- 
pointment Panda said, life’s problems are endless. 
My friend’s brother, what are his options? 
 
A.   Continue causing drama and friction within the family, complicating what 
should otherwise be a happy moment, and damage the trust and respect he 
has with his sister, all because he has a hunch (some might call it an intu- 
ition) that this guy is bad for her. 
B.   Mistrust his own ability to determine what’s right or wrong for his sister’s 
life and remain humble, trust her ability to make her own decisions, and even 
if he doesn’t, live with the results out of his love and respect for her. 
 
Most people choose option A. That’s because option A is the easier path. It re- 
quires little thought, no second-guessing, and zero tolerance of decisions other 
people make that you don’t like. 
It also creates the most misery for everyone involved. 
It’s option B that sustains healthy and happy relationships built on trust and re- 
spect. It’s option B that forces people to remain humble and admit ignorance. It’s 
option B that allows people to grow beyond their insecurities and recognize situa- 
tions where they’re being impulsive or unfair or selfish. 

But option B is hard and painful, so most people don’t choose it. 
My friend’s brother, in protesting her engagement, entered into an imaginary 
battle with himself. Sure, he believed he was trying to protect his sister, but as 
we’ve seen, beliefs are arbitrary; worse yet, they’re often made up after the fact to 
justify whatever values and metrics we’ve chosen for ourselves. The truth is, he 
would rather fuck up his relationship with his sister than consider that he might be 
wrong—even though the latter could help him to grow out of the insecurities that 
made him wrong in the first place. 
I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s 
down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far 
more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up. I have learned this from experience. 
I have been the asshole acting out based on my own insecurities and flawed cer- 
tainties more times than I can count. It’s not pretty. 
That’s not to say there aren’t certain ways in which most people are screwed up. 
And that’s not to say that there aren’t times when you’ll be more right than most 
other people. 
That’s simply reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s re- 
ally just you versus yourself.