Quote of the Day: Eric Sevareid on Daily Inspiration

Online, certainty is the currency: hot takes harden into identity, AI summaries arrive with a sheen of authority, and remote teams move so fast there’s little patience for “I’m not sure.” Yet the most durable kind of confidence often sounds like a pause. “Better to trust the man who is frequently in error than the one who is never in doubt,” Eric Sevareid reminds us, an argument for fallibility in an age addicted to being right.

We tend to equate trustworthiness with accuracy, as if the safest companion is the one who misses least. But the person “frequently in error” may be broadcasting something rarer than correctness: intellectual honesty. Errors, acknowledged, examined, corrected, are often the visible trail of real thinking. They imply a mind willing to test claims against reality, to revise, to let evidence win. That posture creates dependable partners, especially in messy situations where no spreadsheet can produce certainty.

By contrast, the person “never in doubt” can be a hazard disguised as clarity. Doubt isn’t weakness; it’s a sensor. Without it, confidence becomes rigidity, and rigidity becomes a refusal to learn. In workplaces, families, and civic life, the permanently certain are often the hardest to collaborate with, not because they’re always wrong, but because they’re unreachable. The trustworthy person isn’t the one who has all the answers; it’s the one who can say, publicly and calmly, “I may be mistaken,” and then do the work of updating.

Eric Sevareid earned his authority the hard way, reporting through the fog of WWII and helping define modern broadcast journalism at CBS. He knew that the most dangerous errors aren’t the ones corrected on air, but the ones protected by pride.

March invites a quieter kind of reset: before the year accelerates, choose leadership that can admit uncertainty, and practice resilience by treating revisions as strength, not embarrassment, so your convictions stay connected to the truth.