Trying To Do Right

I must confess that I do not watch the Oprah show (we do not have television at home), nor do I buy O, the Oprah magazine. I do loyally look at the Oprah website every day. It is a well-designed website (though I often wish there was more video material on it) and the content is interesting. The website presents a short summation of the daily television program, information about her book club, her monthly magazine, and radio program, as well as other things both spiritual and material.

The main reason I read the site derives from my belief that the topic material Oprah discusses both influences and mirrors certain aspects of American society’s concerns. Yet, I must admit that I do not necessarily feel a personal connection to the subject material (e.g. here) or the way the material is handled (e.g. here). Since I do not watch the show on television, I presume this lack of connection is due to the limitations of acquiring information by reading the site.

That said, I do very much enjoy and connect to online articles in the O, the Oprah magazine written by Martha Beck, Suze Orman, and Lisa Kogan. What they write is inevitably insightful, informative, and very funny. Even if the articles are shortened for the online magazine version (I don’t buy the magazine, so I don’t know if this is so), they are still complete in being able to excite and entertain.

In this month’s magazine, Martha Beck* writes an article titled, “Martha Beck’s Five Best Pieces Of Advice”. Advice number four is “It Is Good To Be Wrong”. She explains how being wrong, or more specifically, a willingness to admit that we are wrong, allows us to open our minds to other possibilities. Here’s the closing sentence in the online version of the article, “You'll see that while insisting that you're right is gratifying, accepting that you're wrong can be transformative”.

I’ve decided to spend the next few days writing about this humbling process of learning to admit to being wrong. Or, more specifically what day-to-day experiences or challenges teach me how to do right.

* If you want to experience Ms. Beck in another medium, Pamela Slim, author of Escape from the Cubicle Nation blog, published an interview/podcast with Ms. Beck back in January of this year.