The Career-Changing Lesson I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
Curtis Poe
Innovative software architect, prompt engineer, and GenAI enthusiast. I balance business needs with technical excellence for optimal solutions.
You may have heard me mention this before, whether it's during another keynote at a conference, or in my various posts here or elsewhere, but given how important this topic is, I'm going to bang this drum a little more.
Picture this: You're in a meeting, and someone presents an idea you know is flawed. Do you:
A) Point out every flaw?
B) Find ways to make the idea work, despite its problems?
Early in my career, I was firmly in camp A. I thought being right was everything.
Spoiler alert: It wasn't.
Let me share a story that illustrates this perfectly:
When SpaceX began launching their Starlink constellation, astronomers worldwide could have argued, "You're ruining ground-based astronomy!" They'd have been right... and completely ineffective.
Instead, they drummed up public support and worked with SpaceX to find a compromise. The result? A win-win situation that protected both space exploration and scientific research.
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The lesson? Being effective trumps being right.
My personal turning point came when I realized my "problem-flagging" approach wasn't winning me any fans. I wasn't the insightful programmer I thought I was; I was the "smug little know-it-all weenie" no one wanted to work with.
The solution was simple yet transformative:
Instead of finding ways projects could fail, I started finding ways projects could succeed. Same skills, different emphasis – and I became a go-to problem-solver, not the naysayer.
This shift doesn't just apply to work. Try it with family, friends, and in any disagreement, ask yourself:
Next time you're observing an argument, analyze it. What are they trying to achieve? Are they being effective? This perspective can radically change how you view people and approach conflicts.
But there's one huge problem with this approach: it requires empathy and that, I fear, is something that we're in short supply of right now. Being effective means being willing to listen to other people's points of view. Being able to hear their concerns and why they have them (asking "why" can be a superpower) gives me the chance to view things in a new light and learn that my being "right" often isn't. It helps me to avoid a very dangerous trap.
So remember: In the dance between being right and being effective, the one who leads with effectiveness usually comes out on top.
What's your take? Have you experienced a similar shift in your approach to disagreements? Share your thoughts below!
Mac expert, UNIX admin, user support specialist, technical writer.
6 个月The other thing I find useful is to try to focus on “the idea behind the idea”. I might have specific problems with this specific recommendation, but is the core problem the recommendation itself, or the problem that it’s trying to solve? Usually, the recommendation is a first-draft attempt to solve a real problem, and yeah maybe we can haggle over how best to address that problem, and maybe the person making the suggestion has reasons for doing things they way they’re proposing (“Chesterson’s Fence” etc), or maybe you have some insight to justify having a different way of thinking about the situation. Either way, keeping the focus on the core problem to be solved, rather than getting into the weeds of why a particular proposal might seem flawed in some way, can in my experience help everyone agree on a better plan for moving forward.