When frustrated with our confusion, my high school physics teacher often liked to say, in a lilting accent with rolled r’s, that “there’s a difference between wrong and absolutely ridiculous.”

It may not be for the reasons that he had in mind, but I think there is definitely a difference: being wrong is boring.

Being absolutely ridiculous is interesting.

I’ve been reading a book called Intuition at Work, by Gary Klein. You can probably guess that it is about intuition. One of his major points is that there is no magical process for developing intuition. The way to build it is through enormous amounts of practice: through making lots of decisions and seeing which ones are right and which are wrong.

In other words, if you don’t make difficult, stimulating decisions or judgments about something, you have no way of developing an intuition for that area.

The lesson, to me, is this: find safe places to be wrong, so you can practice making challenging judgments. When you are wrong, don’t be cautiously, slightly wrong. Be flamboyantly wrong. Be absolutely ridiculous.