The difference between being right and being interesting

Correctness is maintenance. Interesting is creation.

We’re living through a plague of people who are technically correct yet spiritually dead. You know exactly who I’m talking about. It’s the person at the dinner table who interrupts a great story to correct a minor date or statistic, or the reply-guy on Twitter who has a peer-reviewed citation for everything but hasn’t had an original thought since 2016.

But correctness doesn’t make you compelling. And if you look closely, most people today aren’t suffering from a lack of accuracy, they’re suffering from a lack of imagination.

Facts are cheap, actually

Part of the problem is that “being right” has never been cheaper. Fifty years ago, knowing obscure facts was a sign of a well-read mind, but today, it just means you have access to the internet. You can Google or ChatGPT your way into being right about literally anything in seconds. Information is now a commodity, which means it has no inherent value in a deep conversation.

Socrates didn’t walk around Athens shouting answers; he walked around asking annoying questions. He understood that knowledge wasn’t about holding a database of facts, but about the humility of inquiry. Michel de Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, spent his life bragging about what he didn’t know. These men were magnetic not because they were omniscient, but because they were honest about the limits of their own understanding.

When everyone has access to the truth, the differentiator becomes taste. It becomes interpretation, discernment, a point of view. It becomes the ability to take a dry fact and weave it into a story that actually means something.

And yet, we cling to correctness

If being interesting is so much more valuable, why are we so obsessed with being right? Because being right feels safe. It makes the ego buzz. It gives the illusion of some kind of mental superiority.