“It’s perfectly healthy to have an idea tomorrow that contradicts your idea today.”
– Jeff Bezos
Imagine spending 54 years of your life convinced you were right about something…
And you were wrong.
Would you try and hide it?
Take Arianna Huffington.
During World War II the Nazis sent her father to a concentration camp for publishing an underground newspaper.
She too became a passionate columnist and journalist…
And when the Internet came along Arianna – like most people – thought it would never replace print journalism.
- Internet blogwriters needed zero training
- Internet news websites had no fact-checking departments
- Internet news organizations could never seriously affect mainstream debates
She thought that Tom Paine’s first print newspaper in 1737 was the gold standard that would never be surpassed.
And then she realized she was wrong.
It was around 2003-2004 when reports appeared of Iraq War bias in the American media… and Arianna realized honest journalism had nothing to do with pieces of paper.
She set up Huffington Post in 2005.
And this happened:
- Huffington Post created a $1.75 million fund to support investigative journalism around the world
- Huffington Post had a citizen journalist write a blogpost that derailed a presidential election campaign (Obama’s in 2008) for the first time
- Huffington Post convinced Norman Mailer to write his first-ever blogpost
- Huffington Post won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper with a 10-part series on wounded veterans
- Huffington Post was sold for $315 million to AOL
Suddenly, the Internet was the gold standard of unbiased journalism.
Arianna was completely, totally wrong.
And the power of this story is not that she admitted she was wrong…
But she was wrong about something for the right reasons.
When Arianna collapsed from burnout and broke her cheekbone on her desk, she quit the Huffington Post and became a global campaigner against stress in the workplace.
She thought running a 9-figure business as a woman made her a ‘supermom’.
She was wrong again.
But instead of hiding the truth… she flipped the realization into fuel for improving the workplace for women across the world.
Can you imagine?
How powerful an advocate she is because she was wrong about something she cared so much about?
So…
Let me ask you…
What are you wrong about today?