Are you able to defend your opinions without reverting to your special situation in life or business?
Some people defend their opinions based on past success. I must be right because it has worked for me in the past or I have proven myself. I’m successful so I must be right.
These are statements of opinion and highly unsupported. There are many reasons we may have been successful in the past without various opinions being correct. It could be our timing, the efforts of others (few people are successful on their own), and a host of other reasons other than correct opinions. In fact, some people are successful in spite of their erroneous opinions on various subjects.
While I may agree in general with Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People, when he says: “You can’t win an argument” I would disagree with this opinion in certain situations.
Blessed is the person having friends or family with whom they can respectfully disagree and argue zealously.
This blessing has been attributed to Orville and Wilbur Wright and considered a part of their success in developing the first airplane in just a few years, on a tight budget, without formal education (didn’t graduate from high school), and doing so on a part-time basis. Their competition (including some with military backing) was highly educated, significantly financed, and unsuccessful in their efforts.
In my opinion, we never learn much of anything in life by patting each other on the back, agreeing with each other, and telling each other how great we are. That is likely a sure formula for failure.
Conversely, we might not learn much from our past failures and learn a great deal more from our past successes. A commonly held opinion is that we learn from failure. In fact, we may be building on our past successes, learning nothing at all from our failures, when we begin to analyze the facts. Various opinions often go unsupported.
Many people who worked on flying, in the age of the Wright brothers, often did so quietly because they would be ridiculed for being nuts. It took the Wright brothers several years to convince various groups even though they had pictures of their first flight.
