10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Today we’re going to take the right/wrong discussion to a whole new level. We’re going to give up the whole need to be right and conclude that the only “right” version of what we’re looking at together is what the other person actually sees. In other words, I’m going to give up my need to be right for the more noble cause of taking up the other person’s perspective.

Anyway, being right is narcissistic. It’s all centered around me. It’s forcing everyone around me to see what I see, when, in fact, my life could be greatly enriched by seeing things from the other person’s perspective.

In the cartoon above, both people are looking at the same number and seeing different things. These two people could argue until they are blue in the face that they are looking at a “6” or a “9” when, in fact, they are both right. It’s all about perspective. However, you don’t get that perspective until you are willing to leave your point of view and listen to, or look at, someone else’s.

My wife is dyslexic. She often sees things upside down. She could be looking from the “6” point of view and actually seeing a “9.” She talks about this as an advantage — how she can play chess or checkers and flip the board in her mind’s eye and see what the other person sees. Would that we could all be dyslexic in this manner.

So what if I prove I am right? All I’m saying is that my perspective is the only one there is. It’s limiting. I’m limiting my reality to only what I can see. But what if someone sees something I don’t see? Then I will be expanding my reality to see from their point of view. This is what it means to climb into someone else’s shoes. You learn to see what they see. You broaden your perspective. You can see why being right is so overrated.