I stopped trying to win arguments

There's this moment that happens with founders. You're in a room, someone challenges your approach, and you feel your chest tighten. Not because they're wrong. Because you need them to know you're right.

I've watched this play out dozens of times. Smart people, good instincts, building real things—completely stuck because they can't let someone else be right instead.

The addiction to being right isn't about ego. (Okay, it's partly ego.) It's about survival instinct gone wrong.

When you're building from nothing, you make 50 decisions a day with incomplete information. Ship this feature? Hire this person? Pivot or double down? You can't ask for permission. You just decide and live with it.

So you develop this reflex: trust your judgment, move fast, don't second-guess. It works. Until it doesn't.

The problem shows up in meetings. Someone suggests a different approach and you immediately think of three reasons why they're wrong. You're not listening anymore—you're building your counterargument. You might even let them finish talking before you explain why your way is better.

You win the argument. You lose the insight.

Here's what I started noticing: The founders who always won arguments shipped slower.

Not because they made worse decisions. Because their teams stopped bringing them problems.

When you need to be right, people learn to manage you. They bring you solutions that sound like your ideas. They frame suggestions as questions. They stop saying "I think we should..." and start saying "What if we considered..."

You think you're maintaining high standards. You're actually training people to hide disagreement.

The real cost isn't one bad decision. It's all the corrections you never hear about until they're expensive to fix.

This isn't about being less confident. It's about being confident enough to lose arguments on purpose.

I started doing this thing in meetings: When someone disagrees with me, I try to restate their position better than they did. Not sarcastically. Actually make their case stronger.

"So you're saying we should kill this feature because it's slowing down the core experience, and even if we're right about the long-term value, we might not survive long enough to see it pay off?"

Two things happen. First, people trust you more because you actually heard them. Second, you find out if their point holds up when you make it as strong as possible.

Sometimes you realize they're right. Sometimes you realize you're both wrong about the actual problem.

Here's the part that surprised me: Losing arguments makes you ship faster. Because when your team knows you'll actually change your mind, they bring you problems earlier. While they're still cheap to fix.

You have to override your own instincts. When someone challenges you, your brain wants to defend. That's the addiction talking.

Instead, you have to do this:

Pause. Let the defensive feeling happen without acting on it. Then ask: "What would have to be true for their position to be right?"

Not "why are they wrong." What would make them right.

Most of the time, there's a scenario where they are. Maybe not the scenario you're planning for, but a real one. And once you see it, you can either update your plan or explain why you're betting against that scenario.

That's different from just disagreeing. It's showing your work.

I've made this mistake recently. Engineer wanted to rebuild a whole system before adding new features. I pushed back—ship first, refactor later. We went with my approach.

Three months later we were rewriting it anyway, except now we'd built features on top of the shaky foundation. Would've been cheaper to listen.

The sting isn't that I was wrong. It's that I didn't even try to see the scenario where he was right. I just knew my startup philosophy said ship fast, so that's what we did.

This is a daily practice, not a personality trait. You don't become humble. You choose it in specific moments when your brain is screaming at you to be right.

What it looks like:

In 1-on-1s, ask "What am I missing?" and then shut up for 30 seconds. Actual silence. People need time to decide if you really mean it.

In decisions, separate "I think X" from "We're doing X." You can have a strong opinion and still be open to changing it. Say both parts out loud.

When you're wrong, say it in public. Not as performative humility. Just: "I pushed for the other approach, turns out Sarah was right, we're switching." Your team needs to see that changing your mind is normal.

The founders who do this consistently move faster. Not despite being willing to be wrong, but because of it.

Their teams debug them. "You always want to ship faster, but this time we actually need to slow down because..." And they can hear it.