How to admit you were wrong, when it costs something

How do I correct myself when I discover I have been wrong?

Question 4 of the Index

You know already. That is the awkward part. There was a moment, some weeks or months ago, when the thing turned over quietly in your head, and since then you have been carrying two positions at once: the one you hold and the one you keep saying.

The delay is usually not cowardice, which is why treating it as cowardice does not shift it. It is arithmetic. By the time you know you were wrong you have spent something on the earlier position: a decision someone acted on, an argument you won, a person who took your side and is still standing there. Correcting yourself does not only revise a belief. It sends a bill to everyone who bought the first one, and you are the one who has to hand it over.

It helps to separate the two things that the word admitting runs together. There is the correction, which is a change in what you will do from now on and can be made this week. And there is the account, which is the story of how you came to hold the wrong thing and how long you held it after you began to doubt it. The correction is owed to the situation. The account is owed to particular people, and to fewer of them than the dread suggests.

The reliable sign that you are ready is small. You can state the position you are leaving in its strongest form, without the faint contempt that makes it easy to abandon. Until you can do that, what you are drafting is not a correction. It is a case for why anyone would have made the same mistake, which is a different document and does considerably less.