Get It Right Before You Open Your Mouth
Facts matter. They always have. We just seem to have forgotten.
I was eighteen when I joined a local retail firm that sold shoes from their chain of shoe shops throught the UK. I arrived as a snotty-nosed young lad who probably thought he knew considerably more about the world than he actually did.
Sitting at the desk behind me was an old man.
I never really knew what his job was. He had presumably been with the company for years, because a few weeks after I arrived, he retired.
One day, I said something. I can't remember what I said. More specifically, I can't remember the word I used. What I do remember is that I pronounced it incorrectly.
The old man didn't even look up.
"No, lad. You don't say it like that. You should say ________. If you're going to do or say something, make sure you have it right in your head first, before you open your mouth and spout nonsense."
I have forgotten the word.
I have never forgotten the lesson.
More than fifty years later, I found myself thinking about that old man again. I was sitting at my computer, building an online bookshop.
There's a sentence I doubt either of us would have understood in the early 1970s.
The shop is called The Fiction Bookstore, and I was connecting its catalogue to Stripe, which would eventually connect to another system called BookFunnel, so that someone could buy one of my books and have the correct eBook delivered automatically.
The technology would have seemed like science fiction to that old man.
The principle would not.
I had twenty-two products in Stripe. I also had twenty-two products in my own master database.
Book title. Description. SKU. Product ID.
They looked right.
I could have assumed they were right.
Instead, I checked them.
Twenty-one were correct.
One wasn't.
One tiny string of letters and numbers had been attached to the wrong book.
Hardly earth-shattering.
Except that computers don't know what you meant. They know what you told them.
Had I continued building the system on top of that error, somewhere further down the line a customer might have bought one book and received another.
The foundation was wrong.
Everything built upon it would therefore have been wrong.
Which brings me back to the old man.
"Get it right in your head first."
It is astonishing how unfashionable that idea sometimes appears to have become.
We live in an age when almost everyone carries access to more information in their pocket than the greatest libraries in history could contain.
And yet we seem increasingly willing to accept something as true because somebody said it loudly.
Or repeatedly.
Or because lots of other people clicked a button underneath it.
We have confused opinion with evidence, popularity with accuracy, confidence with knowledge and repetition with truth.
They are not the same things.
Facts matter.
They matter when you're building a bookshop.
They matter when you're running a business.
They matter when you're writing a novel based around historical events.
They matter when you're talking about science.
They matter when you're deciding how to spend your money.
And they matter enormously when the subject is important enough to affect other people's lives.
Being wrong isn't the problem.
I've been wrong thousands of times. I expect to manage it several more times before lunch.
The problem is being unwilling to check.
There is nothing shameful about saying, "I don't know."
There is nothing weak about saying, "Let me check that."
And there is certainly nothing embarrassing about discovering that something you believed yesterday was wrong and changing your mind today.
That's called learning.
Facts don't care whether they are convenient.
They don't care whether they support your argument.
They don't become more factual because a million people agree with them, and they don't stop being factual because nobody likes them.
Sometimes the answer really is an older, hopefully wiser, person sitting quietly at a desk behind you.
Twenty-two books.
Twenty-two product IDs.
Twenty-one matches.
One error.
No debate required.
I corrected it.
And somewhere, in whatever celestial stockroom retired shoe-company employees eventually occupy, I like to imagine an old man sitting behind a desk.
He still doesn't look up.
He simply nods.
"That's better, lad."
Then he goes back to his paperwork.
Because if you're going to do or say something, you should probably make sure you've got it right in your head first.
Before you open your mouth and spout nonsense.
Copyright © Tom Kane 2026