

Why You Can't Admit Personal Mistakes on the Internet - gsaines
http://www.georgesaines.com/?p=653

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mnicole
I think this is a pretty drastic way to interpret Rocketr's blog post and the
subsequent HN thread. Something I've been trying to tell myself for years is
__write that post, __because even if I'm wrong, I can always trust the
internet to correct me. Whether that response is friendly or not is entirely
up in the air, but it is up to me to field it and respond accordingly.

The problem isn't with admitting personal mistakes, the issue is the trend of
writing a blog post with a message that's trying to tell the reader what _to_
do or what _not_ to do in a scenario that is entirely subjective or otherwise
specific to a certain business model or team composition. This very entry is
exactly that and to be honest, I'm a little worn of these types of posts;
they're either depressing, narrow-minded or just straight-up finger-wagging
for the sake of pageviews.

When we tell people not to try, we're keeping them from failing. When we tell
people to keep to themselves, we create a society of bottled feelings and
paranoia where we're constantly looking over our shoulders while talking
behind people's backs.

What Andrew got out of writing that post was community feedback about what
else he could or should have done as well as another response from PG. What
the _community_ got out of that post is invaluable, even to someone like me
that has zero plans to make a pitch anytime soon.

At the end of the day, no one should hinder their natural inclinations to be
social and curious or honest for the sake of learning out of fear of looking
like an ass, and the internet as a whole needs to do a better job in embracing
that mentality and responding appropriately so that we can all just live and
learn.

------
phene
Or: "How to appear strong when you are weak." There's a word for people who
never admit to a mistake: liars.

