If you can’t stand to be wrong, you have no business giving crucial advise to people on any subject.
A friend of many years asked me, as we had coffee at a McDonald’s outlet, about a certain doctor of mine (a cardiologist) and if a pacemaker were advisable for me. The upshot of the talk was that it could be dispensed with as the said doctor had given me very helpful advice on the disadvantages, besides the cost.
The talk drifted on the vanity of many a professional be he lawyer, doctor, architect, what have you. Vanity is the greatest enemy of competence in many many cases. No matter how good you may be at something, whether it is composing a sonnet or doing a bypass, analyzing an electron or taking on hopeless criminal cases. IF YOU HAVE AN IMPERATIVE NEED TO BE RIGHT ALL THE TIME, you are betraying your professional conduct.
My own doctor, when recommending surgery some time back, urged me to get a second opinion, even though he was certain that I needed an operation then. Many doctors resent it when a patient indicates a desire to get a second opinion; they look upon this as anathema, or at least an implicit reflection on their medical judgment.
Genuine self-confidence does not feel threatened by being question in this way. In the first place, even the most competent practitioner can make a mistake, and second, the best kind of insurance against a malpractice suit is confirmation by another or a cancus by many other experts who have no vested interest in the treatment.
If you can’t stand to be wrong, you have no business giving crucial advise to people on any subject. If your ego forces you to justify and defend all your decisions, you are temperamentally disqualified from giving such advice, no matter how eminent you are in your chosen field. The need to be right can be more corruptive than any other influence.
The most grievous costly mistakes, whether in medicine, or law, or business dealings, are not clinical, or technical, or fiscal, but personal and emotional. The spring not from ignorance or incompetence (which are intellectual defects) but from stubbornness, vanity, overweening self-esteem, AMOR PROPIO, which are moral and emotional defects.
I would rather consult a doctor who knew a little less and knew how little he knew, than one who knew a great deal and thought he knew more! Ignorance PER SE is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance ‘DI MO ALA NA ‘DI MO PALÂ ALAM! which is why the Delphic oracle told the wisest Greek (Socrates) that he alone recognised how little he knew, which placed him above others.
Rightly, we ought to be grateful to learn we have been mistaken about something; this is the only way experience turns our bad judgement into good judgement. It is only the weak man who feels he cannot afford to utter those three words of supreme strength: “I WAS WRONG.”
