Sometimes the most honest thing you can do for your own reputation is to say, “I was wrong, sorry.” Then you walk it back and you say, “Actually, there’s more evidence than I thought.” And then you can go to people and say, “Here’s the evidence.” You can say, “This is what my mistake was.” You can even say, “I may have been wrong because of unconscious bias.” There is always room to say, “Oh, I’m really sorry I gave you the wrong impression.” And even if you didn’t give the person a false impression, people can react badly to information they did not receive. And you can always do the right thing. Now, if you’re being accused of something, there is never a time to say I didn’t do it. You just go, “Okay, you have evidence.” Don’t deny the evidence. Don’t argue that someone else did it. And don’t argue with who the evidence is against. Just say, “I was wrong. You’re right, I did this.” And then the next thing you do is apologize, “I’m so sorry,” and then move on to saying, “Okay, this is what I’m doing to fix it. Let’s talk about what we’re going to do to fix it.” Now, there are some people who would like to say I was accused of something and they wouldn’t believe that. “You’re just saying you were wrong in order to improve your reputation.” And the answer is, no, I don’t do that. I would say sorry if I did that. I would not go into it thinking, “Okay, I’m going to make a plan to improve my reputation” — as if that had any bearing on it. When people can point to a fact that you said something false that’s held against you or if you make a mistake that hurts people in some way, the one thing you need to do is say, “Okay, I screwed up. I’m sorry.” Say “I’m sorry” directly. Now, if you’re being accused of something, by the way, do not argue with the evidence. Do not fight that. You need to shut down that process. You need to say, “Okay, you have evidence. You have evidence. Okay, here’s the evidence. Here’s the evidence.” That is the quickest way to lose an argument. Shut down the conversation. Say, “Okay, you have evidence. Here’s what it is.” Say, “I apologize. I’m sorry.” And then walk away and don’t defend what you said because that doesn’t help your reputation and it doesn’t help your relationship with the person who accused you or who is upset at you. They want you to admit fault. And they want you to apologize. And if you fail to do that, they will react badly to you. You need to ask what the reaction is to whatever you’re going to say that’s bad news. Now, if you don’t know that, you can just try it. You can say to people, “Okay, I’m going to tell you this.” Then ask, “What’s the first reaction that pops into your head? What’s the first reaction that pops into your head?” That can tell you a lot about how people feel about something. Then you can learn to get people to like your bad news before they actually learn it. So you should say, “Here’s the bad news,” and then ask, “What’s the reaction that you get in your head?” The reason to do that is that you don’t get a lot of good reactions for telling people things about themselves and their friends that are not true. So they’re going to be upset at you for it. The right response to that is, “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” That’s all. You don’t need to explain anything more. Now, how do you prevent yourself from being the person who makes the mistake you really, really, really wish you hadn’t made? Here’s one way. Do you know why when people say something really bad about someone else that it’s hard to prevent it from happening again? It’s hard to prevent it from happening again because of the part of your brain that wants to react badly to someone who has wronged you or someone who has treated you badly, and then tells you that that person is wrong or bad in general. It has to do with emotion and feeling. I’m not talking about emotion. I’m talking about brain function. When you think something is bad, your brain is going to put together two elements that are normally disparate. One, it’s the evidence. Two, it’s the emotion. That’s two things that normally do not go together. The brain has to pull them together. It’s what it does. So when you say that something is bad, then it’s like the part of the brain that says “this is bad” automatically finds the other thing that says “this is bad,” and you can’t help but think it’s bad. It’s a bias toward finding things bad. Now, it’s not just people who do that who think they’re bad. If someone is not doing well in a company, a part of the person will hate that company, and if that company is hated by a part of the person, the first response is to figure out what part of the person hates that company. Then you can try to get that person to do things that make that part happy. You can try to get a person to think well of your company, which is how advertising works. Then you can try to get a part of the person to make you do something and then convince that part of the person that you’re really good. So if you get a bad reputation, you can try to make that part of your brain think you’re good at something. You know what? The right way to look at it is that you’re actually trying to get that part of your brain to be right, to be right in predicting something that happens. And that’s the way it should work. Now, here’s the trick: You have to be mindful that there are parts of your brain that are not going to respond to you as if you were good. That’s how stereotypes work. There’s a part of your brain that will always find reasons to think bad things about women. There’s a part of your brain that will always find reasons to think bad things about black people. There are parts of your brain that will always find reasons to think bad things about Muslims and to think bad things about fat people and to think bad things about conservatives and to think bad things about people who wear glasses. There are other bad things they can find about people. There’s another thing that’s going to make you think badly of someone, which is people who are successful. So it’s a good idea to get into arguments with people who are not successful. You need to learn how to make your own case, so you can avoid these things. Now, it’s very easy to make bad assumptions about people and go, “Ah, this is so true. You are so bad.” In fact, it’s actually even more true about yourself than about other people, because it’s easier to see something that’s true about yourself than it is to see it in another person. Here’s what that means. What we have in the head that tells us what is true is called the theory of mind. It’s called theory of mind because you have to think of something other than yourself in order to know whether it’s true or not. So that’s the way we teach kids. We can’t just say, “Know how to think about things. Don’t trust your emotions.” It’s, “You have to learn what people mean.” That’s the way you learn that stuff. You can’t tell when someone means something without knowing what they mean by it. So that’s the reason that we’re so good at knowing when people are lying to us. We say, “No, that can’t be true. That means I can’t trust you.” This doesn’t work with emotions. What’s easier is to tell whether you’re making a mistake or not when it comes to emotions. It takes a lot of work to control those. If you think, “Oh, I know what it means to be a Christian,” or “Oh, I know what it means to be Jewish,” you’re going to be making the same mistakes in thinking about things that people who really are going to look bad because of what they believe. It’s not just that there’s going to be an element that is in your head saying that you’re in error. There’s going to be something else in your head saying that there’s some sort of threat to the way you perceive the world. So it’s important to know how to use emotion so you can avoid the negative stereotypes in your head. One of the best things is to think about what’s bad when someone makes a mistake. For instance, imagine that you accidentally hurt someone’s feelings. Well, now what are you going to do? Well, you have to try to figure out what you can do so that it won’