During a live television broadcast, Bennett Graebner approved an idea no one had ever tried on the show before. It was polarizing from the start. Some people weren’t sure it would work, and not everyone believed it would create one of the night’s most memorable moments, but it fit the cast member perfectly. They talked it through beforehand, she liked it, and everyone involved moved forward anyway, because it was different. That, Graebner would later reflect, is the real challenge of the job: always pushing to try something new, even when you can’t be certain how it will land.
When the cameras rolled, the cast member froze.
The moment fell flat. Viewers criticized it afterward, and Graebner had to answer for the decision. Looking back, he realized his mistake wasn’t taking the creative risk. It was assuming the moment could only go one way. These were real people, under extraordinary pressure, performing live in front of millions of viewers. He should have had a contingency plan.
The following day, Graebner gathered his producers and apologized. Not for trying something new, but for failing to anticipate what they’d do if it didn’t work. That distinction stayed with him. Being wrong wasn’t the lesson. Learning from why you were wrong was.
That night was hardly unique. Almost everyone can replay the moment a sure thing fell apart: the colleague pegged from day one who turned out to be someone else entirely, the plan that could not miss and did, the argument lost to a single inconvenient fact. Bennett Graebner collected more of those moments than most, since almost two decades and more than 400 episodes of unscripted television kept showing him, on camera, exactly how his judgments about people and stories held up.
“Every day is filled with minor failures. Frankly, I make decisions all the time that turn out to be wrong,” Graebner once said. “Learn from the mistakes, but then move on.”
Some of his biggest professional lessons, he says, come from discovering he has completely misjudged a person or a situation. What makes those lessons valuable is never the error itself but what happens next, and that part, unlike the error, is a choice.
Being wrong, in his experience, is not the failure it feels like. It is often the beginning of understanding, and learning to be comfortable with it may be the most quietly useful skill in professional life.
Why Being Wrong Feels Like Failing?
Writer Kathryn Schulz, who spent years studying error and made the case for embracing it in one of TED’s most-watched talks, points out the strange mechanics of the experience: being wrong feels exactly like being right, up until the instant it doesn’t. We have no internal alarm for error in progress, only for error discovered, which is why the discovery arrives with a sting.
That sting gets worse when beliefs function as possessions. A person who has argued for a judgment in public, or built plans on it, experiences the correction as a loss of property rather than a gain of information, and defends accordingly.
Workplaces compound the mechanics. Admitting an error in front of colleagues can feel like a career risk, so organizations full of smart people quietly defend stale judgments long past their expiration, and the defense reads as confidence right up until it reads as stubbornness.
The 82% Problem
Overconfidence is not a rare affliction. Research by Duke psychologist Mark Leary, summarized by Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, found that 82% of surveyed adults said that in their disagreements with others, they were usually the one who was right.
That statistic is less an indictment than a reminder of how convincing our own certainty feels. None of us experiences being wrong while we’re wrong. We only experience discovering it later.
Leary’s work points at the alternative, a trait researchers call intellectual humility: the recognition that your beliefs might be wrong because the evidence behind them could be limited or flawed. Intellectually humble people in his studies were sharper at telling good evidence from bad, spent more time reading viewpoints that opposed their own, and were less defensive when errors surfaced.
None of that made them pushovers. Humility about beliefs is a claim about evidence, never about worth, and the people who practice it tend to end up with more accurate maps than those who assume they’re usually right.
What Bennett Graebner Learned From His Own Misses?
Unscripted television gave Bennett Graebner an unusually honest scoreboard, since a misjudged person or a misread story revealed itself in front of an audience.
Misjudged storylines taught him the expensive version of the lesson. A story defended past its evidence cost real days and real budget, the sunk cost fallacy playing out with cameras rolling, and killing a favorite idea early almost always turned out cheaper than nursing it toward a finale that was never coming.
Bennett Graebner eventually came to think of mistakes not as verdicts but as tuition. Every miss contained something useful: an assumption that deserved revisiting, a contingency plan that should have existed, or a blind spot that experience had just exposed.
He has offered a companion rule about creative work that turns out to be a rule about judgment generally: “It’s never as good as you think it is, it’s never as bad as you think it is.” Both halves guard against the same mistake, which is trusting today’s certainty too much in either direction.
How Do You Get Comfortable Being Wrong?
Comfort with error is a practice rather than a temperament, and the practice has learnable parts:
- Separate the decision from the outcome, since good calls sometimes lose and bad ones sometimes get lucky.
- Say “I was wrong about that” out loud early, before the evidence forces the words.
- Name the assumption that caused the miss, so the lesson attaches to something specific.
- Keep score honestly, because a person who is never wrong is usually keeping bad records.
History’s cleanest version of the practice belongs to Charles Darwin, who followed what he called a golden rule: whenever he encountered a published fact or observation that opposed his general results, he wrote it down immediately, because he had noticed that contrary evidence slips from memory faster than the agreeable kind. A man assembling one of the most consequential theories in science treated his own certainty as the thing to guard against, and the theory came out stronger for it.
One caution belongs alongside the list. Comfort with being wrong is not indifference to it, and some errors carry costs that deserve real weight. Speed of updating is the goal, never casualness, and the two look nothing alike from close up.
The Beginning of Understanding
Careers, like stories, tend to turn on those corrections. Writers know the pattern intimately, since a first draft is a stack of confident wrong guesses that revision slowly makes true, and the screenwriting Graebner has returned to runs on exactly that tolerance.
After nearly two decades of making thousands of judgment calls, Bennett Graebner no longer sees being wrong as something to avoid at all costs. It’s simply part of getting better. The goal isn’t to protect your ego. It’s to update your understanding. In his experience, the people worth trusting aren’t the ones who never make mistakes. They’re the ones who are willing to own them, learn from them, and make a better decision the next time.
