On Being Wrong - A Man Called Ove

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong.
Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time. Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

Why admitting you are wrong matters

Admitting a mistake is uncomfortable. Admitting one you have carried for years is almost unbearable. We build our sense of ourselves on the side of being right: the longer a belief has stood, the more it feels like part of who we are, and the more it costs to take it down. Stubbornness is rarely the friend of growth.

Where the line comes from

In A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman builds his story around a man who has spent decades perfecting routines and rules. Ove is a widower, stubborn, suspicious of the modern world, and quietly certain that his way is the right way. The line above belongs to that portrait: a confession about how much a person can invest in being right. What makes the book work is that Backman never turns Ove into a joke. The grumpiness is armour, built from grief and habit, and his neighbours chip away at it one small kindness at a time. Beneath the rules is loss: Ove's wife Sonja has died, and his routines are the way he keeps her world orderly and his own grief at arm's length. When the line speaks of being wrong for a long time, it is also grief speaking.

Why it holds today

The hard version of this is not the dramatic argument; it is the ordinary Tuesday when a small thing you have insisted on for years turns out to be wrong. The instinct is to protect the belief, because changing it would mean admitting the years were wasted. They were not. A long-held belief that turns out to be wrong is still the best map you had at the time; it just happens to point somewhere new. The test is whether you can say "I was wrong about that" out loud, once, quickly, and then return to the person in front of you instead of defending the past. What matters in the end is not the winning, but the repair.

Image: Lena Polishko (@ilona_a), Unsplash – Unsplash License