Adults Can Be Wrong

I used to go two churches every week when I was growing up.

My mom was Seventh-Day Adventist, and my dad was Pentecostal, so our family went to church on Saturdays and Sundays.

As with all good church kids, we learned the Ten Commandments. One Sunday at the Pentecostal church, we were going through them.

One: you shall have no other gods before me.

Two: you shall not make any idols.

Three: you shall not take the name of the Lord God in vain.

Four: remember to keep Sunday holy.

Fiv— wait, what?

Sunday?

I looked again at my Bible. It said, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.”

I raised my hand to ask the Sunday School teacher to clarify. “Excuse me, you said ‘Sunday’ but you meant ‘Sabbath,’ right?”

“Yes.” they said. “Sunday is the Sabbath.”

Um.

That's not what I learned at the Seventh-Day Adventist church. In Sabbath School, they said that Saturday was the Sabbath.

I said as much. They said I was wrong. I insisted. They kicked me out and told me to go sit with my parents.

For a shy, straight-A’s kid who never had anything close to a disciplinary issue before, this was embarrassing and humiliating. Kicked out for something I learned?

As I sat with my parents processing it all in my mind, a thought dawned on me. A group of adults taught me that Saturday was the Sabbath. A different group of adults taught me that Sunday was the Sabbath.

One of these groups of adults was wrong. Or maybe both groups were. Either way, the lesson is the same:

Adults can be wrong.

This was a new idea to me. I was a generally compliant, obedient kid. I listened to my parents, my grandparents, my teachers, my uncles and aunts, and other adult authority figures because I assumed they were always right.

But what if I didn’t have to? What if adults were sharing their opinions and beliefs and not always truth?

This is the kind of thinking that turns some kids rebellious, but it didn’t go that direction for me for whatever reason. Instead of being rebellious, I became curious. I became discerning. I learned to value my own opinions. I didn’t reject what adults said, but I didn’t accept it as truth. I’m rarely insubordinate, but I do value alignment over authority. I’m always agreeable but I don’t always agree. I didn’t become skeptical or cynical; I learned to develop a worldview and measured ideas against it.

I think about this memory often. It plays a big part in my life to this day.

Even though I’m an adult now, there are still “adults” in my personal and professional life, people I think are “supposed” to be respected and whose word is to be taken at face value as truth: elders, politicians, people in charge of something, clients, bosses, managers, and more.

I’m realizing now that it wasn’t about adults vs. kids.

It was about power.

Truth gives you power.

Very few of us actually have truth, but pretending we do—or pretending we at least have more than someone else—seems to give you power too. If someone is “righter” than you, they seemingly have the right to tell you what to do. Adults do this to kids all the time.

I’ve noticed a pattern when I work on client projects with other designers where I’m creative directing. Clients give feedback, so the designers go to make the requested changes. I ask them if they agree with the requests, and they look at me, puzzled. For a lot of designers, it doesn’t occur to them that they don’t have to make the changes. It’s been drilled into so many designers that the job is to make stuff and continuously change it until those with power are happy.

That’s not the job of a designer.

The job of a designer is to use our power of manifesting ideas for good.

Having an opinion gives you power. Boundaries give you power. A strong worldview gives you power.

I’m not suggesting that you push back on client requests on principle or try to be a diva. I’m only suggesting that adults can be wrong. Your client can be wrong, even though they’re paying you. Your product manager can be wrong, even though they have some data. Your CEO can be wrong, even though they have a strong opinion.

Yes, I’ve lost projects by having a strong opinion. But I’ve also gotten projects to the finish line by being an opinionated, trustworthy person. Almost all of my client projects have started with the client innocently assuming that dynamic will be that they’ll say stuff and I’ll do it. That all changes the first time I say, “I don’t think we should do that.” More often than not for me, that’s been the gateway to a different kind of conversation, one that leads to a more collaborative partnership where the power is more evenly distributed.

That’s kinda the point: when anyone can be wrong, that also means anyone can be right.

I try to practice this in reverse now that I’m an adult, specifically a parent. I do take seriously that part of my responsibility as a parent is to teach and train my kids, but I’m open to the idea that I can be wrong. And I even try to let them know that sometimes I’ll be wrong and they’ll be right. Like I train my designers to question their briefs and prompts, I train my kids to know that they can question me, or any adult in their lives. I don’t give them permission to be disrespectful to anyone, but I do encourage them to form their own worldviews and evaluate the things that rub against it. I want them to have power, and this is a way they can get it for themselves when it’s not always given to them.

—Dan