Stubbornness

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been called stubborn.

Is that a bad thing? Depends. Nobody gets called stubborn for giving up.

There are two kinds, and from the outside they look identical.

• Standing our ground for something we believe in.

• Digging our heels in for the sake of it.

Same jaw, same folded arms, same refusal to budge. One of them gets you somewhere. The other gets you nowhere, slowly, and makes sure everyone around you is sick of it.

Knowing which one you’re doing is the whole trick.

The version that goes round the internet is “Stubbornness is not firmness. Stubbornness is stupidity.” Punchier, but that’s a paraphrase. The line above is what the old blind prophet actually says to a king who won’t back down, and the king loses his son over it. Two and a half thousand years and it still lands.

Being stubborn is what pushes you through the bit where everyone else quits.

It’s the grit that gets sh*t done when the going gets tough. Nobody finishes a hard thing by being reasonable about it on the bad days. They finish it because they’re too pig-headed to stop.

Angela Duckworth put a name on this. She tested cadets arriving at West Point in 2004 on a short grit questionnaire and found it predicted who survived the brutal first summer better than the admissions score did. The ones who stayed weren’t the cleverest. They were the ones who wouldn’t let go.

I failed my driving test twice and sat it a third time. I covered that in Automaticity. Stubborn, by any definition. Also the only reason I can drive.

So use it. Point it at a goal and let it drag you through. Just don’t point it at the feedback.

Here’s the other side of the same trait.

Holding onto your old way of doing things can blind you to a better one, and the longer you hold on the harder it gets to admit it. You’re not always right. That’s fine. Everyone’s wrong most days. The problem starts when being wrong feels worse than being stuck.

Stephen Covey’s line in The 7 Habits was seek first to understand, then to be understood. I used to read that as a nice thing to say. It’s actually a tactic. If you’ve genuinely understood the other side and you still disagree, you’re standing firm. If you’ve refused to hear it, you’re just being a nob. I covered the listening half in Active listening.

The honest test is this. When was the last time you changed your mind because someone made a better argument than yours? If you can’t remember, it’s not firmness.

Ever kept at something purely because of how much you’d already put in?

That’s the sunk cost fallacy screwing with your head. The time, the money, the effort: it’s gone whether you carry on or not. Only the next bit is still yours to decide. Your brain doesn’t see it that way. It sees the pile you’ve built and refuses to walk away from it.

Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer at Ohio University showed it in 1985 with theatre tickets. People who paid full price for a season ticket turned up to more plays in the first half of the season than people who’d been handed the same ticket at a discount. Same plays, same seats. The only difference was how much it had cost them, and that was enough to drag them out on a wet Tuesday.

Daniel Kahneman put it in Thinking, Fast and Slow for a reason. It catches everyone, including the people who study it.

Relationships are where I’ve seen it do the most damage. Not “is this good for me” but “we’ve been together six years”. Six years isn’t a reason. It’s a receipt. If you’re in that one, read the ASAP breakup guide and be honest with yourself about which section you’re in.

Cutting your losses isn’t failure. It’s arithmetic.

Being assertive is standing up for yourself. Being stubborn is refusing to consider anyone else.

They get confused because they share a posture. Both say no. The difference is what happens before the no. The assertive man heard the other side, weighed it and still said no. The stubborn man said no to save himself the bother of weighing it.

I wrote about the first one in Assertiveness. It’s a skill, and you can learn it without turning into someone nobody wants to work with. Stubbornness isn’t a skill. It’s the thing you do when you haven’t learned one.

So how do you tell which you’re doing?

Ask yourself one question. If I turned out to be wrong about this, would I want to know?

If yes, hold your ground. You’re firm.

If the honest answer is no, you’re not defending a position. You’re defending your pride, and the position is just where it happens to be standing.

Stubbornness isn’t good or bad. It’s a weight, and it lands wherever you put it.

Some of the best things I’ve done, I did because I was too stubborn to stop. Some of the worst years I’ve had, I had because I was too stubborn to leave.

Same trait. Same me.

So check yourself. Are you standing firm for the right reasons, or just standing in your own way?