Martin León Barreto
The Incredible Power of Being Wrong
With the right approach, mistakes can be the fuel for your greatest victories.
- By
- August 11, 2025
- CBR - Strategy
When you think about the events that have led to success in your career, you probably think about the flattering ones: times when you were insightful, courageous, or determined. You might not think about the times you were wrong, but you should. Mistakes, misfires, and “oopsies” are pure gold. Let me share three stories that illustrate why.
The first is set in 2002, when I was on the faculty of the University of Rochester and invited to give a talk at Chicago Booth about a paper I had coauthored. I won’t go into the details of what I talked about, but if you had asked me right after my talk, I would have told you that I had crushed it. I had gotten through all my slides (not a minor accomplishment at a Booth seminar), had answered every question, and felt pretty great.
Then, walking to meet some colleagues, I overheard Jean-Pierre Dubé say to another Booth professor, “The guy is so completely wrong. You can’t do what he’s trying to do.” My first instinct was to be defensive and think, “He’s wrong, not me.” But I said nothing. I went to my meetings, slightly subdued. That night, I barely slept.
The truth is that I didn’t actually know if I was wrong. I’d leaned on a coauthor for the technical parts of the paper. So I dove in, worked hard, and after a painful month or so, came to the deflating conclusion that Jean-Pierre was right. I was wrong and hadn’t realized it. I decided to scrap the paper—two years of work—and start again.
Later, I met Stanford’s Harikesh Nair, a Booth alumnus. I shared my failure with him, and we reworked the idea from scratch. Since I now knew how I was wrong, I could help design a framework that didn’t fall into the same traps. The new paper won awards and changed how people thought about the topic. And as Jean-Pierre and others would later tell me, it led to Booth recruiting me.
I have always been thankful to Jean-Pierre for unknowingly telling me that I was wrong. Since then, I have paid him back many times, by telling him he is wrong every chance I get. But as I learned, being told you are wrong can be just the right thing to happen as long as you are open to the possibility of that conclusion.
My second story is related but has a slightly different context. A few years ago, I was advising a startup that used artificial intelligence to optimize marketing budgets. It was a cool idea: Use machine learning to estimate the effects of marketing interventions such as advertising and reallocate money accordingly.
The problem? There was no experimental data, which made the task of estimating difficult. And from an academic perspective, the estimates the company was producing were completely wrong. Try as I might, I couldn’t fix that.
Accept the fact that you’ll be wrong. That’s not failure; it’s feedback.
I wasn’t sure what to do. There was no way to convince myself or any other expert that the results were correct, and yet we were “selling” them to clients who were using them for decision-making. But when I talked to the clients, I realized something strange. Even though the estimates were wrong, the decisions were right.
This isn’t as paradoxical as it sounds. If you use observational (rather than experimental) data to estimate the effect of advertising, you’ll likely overestimate return on investment because ads are usually targeted to people who are already going to buy the product or service being advertised. But if you know that the estimates are biased upward, you can still cut out ad channels for which your data show negative ROI, since the true ROI is even worse. Even when you are wrong, knowing how you are wrong can help you make the right call.
My final story is about a project I worked on with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in California. SNAP helps low-income individuals by providing money for food, but federal law requires recipients to fill out a recertification form six months after enrolling. Many people don’t do that, and therefore lose their benefits.
Our goal was to build an AI system that personalized reminder messages to help people stay enrolled. It worked and led to a 30 percent improvement in retention, resulting in about $14 million more in benefits to those who needed them most. We projected that if the system were to be implemented across the United States, it would have an impact of more than $4 billion.
The catch? I had predicted a 60 percent improvement in retention. So I had been very, very wrong.
When I presented this at research seminars, including at prestigious schools, some people were genuinely uncomfortable that I was admitting the gap. One even said, “Why not just say you got 30 percent and move on?” But I was wrong, and owning that sparked more meaningful conversations about how to improve. Indeed, there were amazing scholars who appreciated me pointing out how and why I had gotten things wrong.
That experience taught me two things: First, people often get uncomfortable when you admit being wrong. Second, how people respond to mistakes, yours or theirs, is an excellent litmus test of character. Owning your mistakes invites better ideas—and better people.
In summary, here’s my “Be wrong” strategy:
- Accept the fact that you’ll be wrong. That’s not failure; it’s feedback. To paraphrase the late behavioral scientist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, being wrong simply means you will be less wrong in the future!
- Surround yourself with people who will tell you you’re wrong. Pick people to work with who challenge you.
- Study your mistakes. Figure out how and why you were wrong. Learn and adapt, or at the very least, reuse the failure creatively.
- Finally, talk about the possibility of being wrong. I tell students, “I will say things that are blatantly false, and you need to call me out.” Encourage dissent. Normalize being wrong. Admitting mistakes and pointing them out is a prerequisite for honest discourse and the only way to learn and improve.
Trust me, this will work. Or I could be wrong.
Sanjog Misra is the Charles H. Kellstadt Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing and Applied AI at Chicago Booth. This essay is adapted from the speech he gave in June for Booth’s Graduation Ceremony at the 539th Convocation of the University of Chicago.
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