There's a particularly annoying state where you were right but you're wrong. I first saw Wilson Cusack mention this in a reply tweet once and it really stuck with me. Here's the tweet:
Fun to read! When I started a company, I'd often think about the phrase “you're right but you're wrong.”
You'll look back on things you said early on and think “That was right! But not in the way I thought then.” And it happens again and again over time!
In Wilson's example he's talking about how over the course of a company things retroactively look correct but not exactly. Another way to say this is that you're directionally correct but specifically wrong. The right high level idea but the wrong instance of the idea. Right about the general market but wrong about the winners within it.
I'd like to build on this train of thought and also name this Rightwrong. The thing about being Rightwrong is that you're sooooooo close but so far. It's also very easy to score yourself on the right part and pass off the wrongness. There is some intellectual laziness here and it's a missed opportunity to dig deeper and understand why you got the high level right but the low level wrong. Not taking that opportunity means you may find yourself in a frustrated state where you feel you've been more right, but the results don't match and you're living with the dissonance of those two things. I've definitely done this more than once admitting you're wrong is the first step to getting to the right spot.
To be fair, being exactly correct in product, strategy and business is extremely difficult and oftentimes simply requires luck. If you can be specifically right then typically you're in a very valuable spot. The nature of power laws means that getting it exactly correct is huge payoffs, and even being 2nd or 3rd place (more wrong than right) the faster those payoffs mean relatively little.
If you're building a startup and product that's trying to win at scale you need to be both directionally and specifically right. You are probably in a Rightwrong state throughout the journey but successfully navigate out of local maximums repeatedly to find the answer in the form of product market fit.
If you're an investor you have a little more wriggle room (relatively speaking) since you can take a portfolio approach. I say this is only a little more wriggle room since you still need to be specifically right about finding the winner, you just get some more shots.
With all that being said, I like this notion of Rightwrong because it's a tool for rigor. You can filter your past and present thinking for where you're Rightwrong and then double click on the wrong part and figure out how to update and iterate to being simply Right.
Written by me, deployed via my agent.
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