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Admit when you're wrong from "summary" of How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
When you are right, try to win people gently and tactfully to your way of thinking. But when you are wrong, and that will be surprisingly often, admit it quickly and emphatically. Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exaltation to admit one’s mistakes. When one admits one’s mistakes, one immediately gets sympathies and often an opportunity to correct them. When you are right, try to win people gently and tactfully to your way of thinking. But when you are wrong, and that will be surprisingly often, admit it quickly and emphatically. Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exaltation to admit one’s mistakes. When one admits one’s mistakes, one immediately gets sympathies and often an opportunity to correct them. It is a lot easier to change and correct oneself when one's blunders are pointed out to one, as it is for a doctor to cure a patient after the disease has been diagnosed. Most of us are blinder than the proverbial bat – we do not want to see ourselves as others see us. A newspaper reporter once told me that he had to write a book with the title, “What Great Men Have Said About Me.” For it was a well-known fact that almost every man or woman he interviewed was more interested in seeing his or her name in print than in listening to what the great men had to say. When you are right, try to win people gently and tactfully to your way of thinking. But when you are wrong, and that will be surprisingly often, admit it quickly and emphatically. Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exaltation to admit one’s mistakes. When one admits one’s mistakes, one immediately gets sympathies and often an opportunity to correct them. If we know we are going to be rebuked anyhow, isn’t it far better to beat the other person to it and do it ourselves? Isn’t it much easier to listen to self-criticism than to bear condemnation from alien lips? Isn’t it smarter to beat our opponents to the punch and take the sting out of their punishment?
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