Being Right All The Time Doesn’t Make Me An Ass

Being right all the time totally makes you an ass. It does. I suffered from this disease of always having to be right in any conversation and all arguments for most of my life. I’m more self-aware of the detrimental side effects today than I’ve ever been, but, yes, I have to work on it and, yes, now that I recognize the negative impact with better clarity, I don’t know how anyone ever put up with it. As with so many things, the obsession any of us has with being right usually goes way back. For me, so much of it was a by-product of wanting to be accepted, deemed worthy, and loved. Dang it, did I want my parents to think I was perfect. Added to that were the ulcer-inducing anxieties I had about how to fit in and be accepted by my peers at school. And so I honed the unhealthy craft of trying to say and do the things that would show me to be right, of value, accepted, or at the very least not wrong or rejected. This, of course, eventually bled over into professional settings where over-arguing became my unconscious attempt to preempt being found out as an under-qualified imposter. Now that I can look back on all this more clearly, I realize the need to be right always came back to two primary catalysts: fear and ego. Fear of what being wrong might say about me at my core, and ego driving me to battle for an argument win, regardless of cost. Neither serves me or my relationships. Instead, in a world where I more comfortable with a good debate, I weaponized my debating strength to a point that it became a weakness over and over in relationships, which was ironic given how it all began with my desire for acceptance.