This was originally posted on LinkedIn.

When was the last time you asked yourself if you might be wrong?

I just finished reading “Hell Yea or No” by Derek Sivers. The book is about how to make decisions, and one part, about how we perceive our own abilities, really landed with me.

Sivers talks about how most people think they are above average at any given thing. 93% of drivers think they’re a better driver than the average driver, 94% of professors think they are better than average teachers. Obviously, half of these people are wrong. Sivers’ revelation was to assume he was one of them.

This reminded me of a time I did something really stupid. Many years ago I was running a video game subscription business (think DVDs by post, but for the Playstation 2). The business was undercapitalized and failing, and we were all struggling. One day one of my co-founders wondered out loud if we could take the platform we’d developed for video game rentals and use it for something else.

“Like what?” I said

“How about razorblades? People buy them every month, and they’re small enough to mail. You could do a subscription for razorblades”.

My business partner, Ian, had just invented Dollar Shave Club, ten years before Dollar Shave Club did. And I talked him out of it.

I don’t think I was rude, or dismissive, or closed to new ideas. In fact, at that moment, we were all desperate for a new idea. We talked about it, and the idea just didn’t make sense to me, and in the end I convinced him that it didn’t make sense to him either.

Of course I was dead wrong.

How might life have been different if I’d assumed that I might be wrong? Maybe Ian should have argued harder for the idea, but equally I could have made us find out what even 10 or 20 people thought, rather than just the two of us, and maybe I’d have changed my mind.

I don’t hugely regret that incident, there is no reason to believe we’d have been any better at growing the shaving business than the video games one (and we sucked at that), but I do try and bear it in mind when people bring me ideas now.

Even if you think you’ve properly considered something, you might be wrong.