For a long time, I thought it was important to have a good argument. If you have facts, experience, and good reasons, it’s natural to want the other person to see that you’re right.
Later, I realized that sometimes a person can win an argument but lose things that are much more important. You can be right and still humiliate someone. You can prove to someone else that they’re wrong and make it harder for them to speak honestly with you again. You can win an argument in a meeting and end up with a team that stays silent next time. You can have the last word in a private conversation only to realize later that you ended something you never meant to end.
It’s especially dangerous when a person has experience, authority, or a position of power. Then getting the last word is easy. It’s much harder to leave room for the possibility that perhaps you haven’t seen everything.
For years, I valued the ability to defend my position more than the ability to question it. Today, something else is more important to me. If someone tells me something I don’t like, can I first try to understand it before I start responding? If I’m wrong, can I admit it without adding an explanation just to save face? If someone else has a better idea, can I accept it without needing to claim a part of it as my own?
The need to always be right has a catch. The bill rarely comes due immediately. We pay it later, in the silence of people who have stopped telling us what they think, in conversations that have become more guarded, and in relationships where everyone already knows who will have the last word.
Perhaps maturity isn’t about learning to defend our opinions better. Perhaps it begins when we no longer need to win every argument.
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