The Cost of Being Right

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This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Thanks for taking the time to read along.

I appreciate you, and more importantly, it seems you do too.

Ever won an argument and felt worse afterward?

This week I'm digging into the cost of needing to be right, and why choosing peace is often the better move.

We then explore the life of Dr. V, a man who took an unfortunate personal circumstance and turned it into something incredible.

Throw in a recommendation my wife and I stand behind and a powerful lesson from Sir Isaac Newton, and you've got a week full of insights and inspiration.

So settle in, and let's learn a little more about ourselves and the world around us.

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

Some arguments are worth having.

Most aren't.

The trouble is, in the heat of the moment, they all feel like they are.

It might be a throwaway comment at dinner, or a colleague taking the credit for your idea, or someone who's clearly wrong about something but completely sure they’re right.

And there it is.

That little hum in your chest that says, I can't let this go.

We've all felt it.

The pull to set the record straight.

The desire to land the final word, to prove the point.

It feels like strength but most of the time, it's just expensive.

I've been watching this play out at home lately.

My two kids, age twelve and eight, are generally really good together.

97.4% of the time.

They play, they invent, they look out for each other, and watching it take place makes me prouder than just about anything else.

Then every so often, ego slips into the room.

Suddenly, they both believe they’re right, the other is wrong, and neither will give an inch.

Heels are dug right in.

Holding their ground over something that won't matter in matter of minutes.

For my daughter at eight, the nuance is still landing.

A work in progress.

For my son at twelve, it's become one of our regular conversations.

Not about who was right, but about catching the moment the need to be right takes over, and choosing a little flexibility over driving his point into the ground.

Because sometimes the relationship is worth more than the moment, and the smallest concessions can build a bridge.

And it isn't only them.

Watching my kids debate is a speedy version of pretty much every adult disagreement I've witnessed.

The thing being contested is rarely of any real significance.

While the peace we trade away to win it, generally is.

Watching my kids just the other day brought me back to something my Dad told me.

I was quite young when he said it, and I've long forgotten the context of the conversation.

But the words have never left me.

"If you think you're always right? There's the first thing you have wrong."

It's the quickest ego check I know.

The moment I'm certain I've got everything figured out is the moment I should look again.

The lesson I'm trying to pass to my son is the same one my father handed to me.

There's a simple way of looking at things that I’ve relied upon for years.

Everything in life fits into one of three buckets.

Things we can control.

Things we can influence.

And things we simply have to accept.

We control our effort, our words, our responses.

Pour your energy there.

We can influence some things at the edges.

Thing’s like other people's moods, their choices, their opinions of you.

You can nudge but you can't dictate.

So pick your moments.

Then there's the third bucket.

The weather. The traffic. The past.

The fact that a relative will, once again, have thoughts about how you're living your life.

These you accept.

Fighting them is like arguing with the rain.

It changes nothing and leaves you soaked.

This idea isn’t new.

The Stoics were writing about it two thousand years ago.

Epictetus called it the dichotomy of control.

Stephen Covey rebuilt it for modern life as the Circle of Influence and the Circle of Concern, and his observation was simple.

The people who thrive spend their energy inside the circle they can actually impact.

Everyone else burns out worrying about the circle they can't.

Most of our stress lives in the wrong bucket.

There's a large gap between winning an argument and winning peace.

When we insist on being right at all costs, we treat every disagreement like a court case.

We gather evidence, build a case and push for a conviction.

And sometimes we get one.

Yay, we win.

We’ve been proven right.

Then we look up and notice the room has gone cold.

The price of proving a point is rarely paid in cash.

It's paid in trust.

In goodwill.

After years of building a relationship, you've jeopardised it just to prove a point that will be irrelevant by tomorrow.

So why is that pull so strong?

Part of it is wiring.

When someone challenges what we believe, our brain doesn't file it under "useful feedback."

It files it under "threat."

Psychologists have a name for the discomfort that follows: cognitive dissonance.

It's the friction we feel when reality bumps up against our sense of who we are.

Being wrong stops feeling like a simple error and starts feeling like an attack on the self.

There's a second force, too.

Behavioural researchers call it loss aversion.

We feel a loss far more sharply than a win of the same size.

So "losing" a disagreement stings out of all proportion to what's actually at stake, which is usually almost nothing.

Knowing this won't switch the urge off.

But what it does is let you catch it.

To notice the hum, name it for what it is, and ask whether this is really a hill you’re willing to die on.

Further to this, the cost rarely stops with you.

The same instinct that chills a dinner table can stall a boardroom, a marriage, a whole community.

When the desire to be right outweighs common sense and the common good, progress stalls and cooperation falls apart.

When being right matters more than being wise, everyone loses.

Not every disagreement deserves your time and energy.

Some of them, though, some of them really do.

So, before you engage, it helps to run the moment through a quick filter:

Is this touching a real value or boundary, or is it just my ego asking for a win?

And will it still matter in six months?

If it's a genuine boundary and it'll matter down the road, engage.

Calmly, clearly, on purpose.

That's a conversation worth having.

Everything else is a fight your ego picked, not you.

Walking away from a winnable fight gets mistaken for weakness.

The opposite is much closer to the truth.

It starves the drama.

An argument needs fuel from both sides to keep burning.

Stop feeding it and it goes out on its own.

You don't have to win.

You just have to stop playing which protects your energy.

Every hill you choose to die on leaves you with less strength for the mountains you really need to climb.

Nobody has unlimited reserves of patience and focus.

Spend yours where they count and move your focus back to what matters.

Being right is usually the ego asking to be fed.

Let it go and your attention swings back to the outcome, to the relationship, to the thing you actually wanted before the argument hijacked the moment.

And here's the lesson that surprised me most.

Some conflict was never meant to be solved.

Relationship researcher John Gottman spent decades studying couples and found that roughly 69% of their conflicts are perpetual.

They’re rooted in personality, values, the way two people are simply built.

They never get fully resolved.

The couples who flourish aren't the ones who win these arguments.

They're the ones who learn to live alongside them with humour and grace.

Sound familiar?

That's the third bucket.

Not every difference is a problem to fix.

Some are just part of the landscape.

Next time you sense that hum bubbling to the surface?

The urge to correct, or to double down, or to get the last word.

Pause on a single question: If I win this, what do I actually gain?

And what am I giving up to get it?

Most of the time the honest answer is uncomfortable.

You'd gain the brief, hollow satisfaction of being right.

But you tend to give up something worth plenty more.

The calmness of the moment, loss of trust in a relationship, or simply an hour of your own peace.

That pause is everything.

Between what happens to us and how we respond, there's a small space.

That gap is where freedom lives.

It's the difference between reacting and choosing.

You don't have to win the moment to keep your power.

More often, you keep it by letting the moment pass.

I used to think being right was the goal.

That if I just explained myself clearly enough, lined up enough evidence and held the line long enough, I'd win, and winning would feel good.

It rarely did.

What I've learned, slowly and usually the hard way, is that peace is the greater prize.

I don't mean the passive kind, where you swallow your voice and let people walk over you.

I mean the deliberate kind, where you decide your own calm is worth more than the verdict.

Being right is cheap.

Anyone can be right and alone.

The harder, rarer thing is to know which battles are actually yours, and fight those well.

And to let the rest drift by like the weather does.

So you've still got something left in the tank for the people, and the work, that deserve it.

Next time you feel that pull to prove a point, stop and ask what the victory will cost you.

You might find the most powerful thing you can do is set your breifcase case down, walk out of the courtroom, and choose peace instead.

Want to go a bit deeper on why we cling to being right?

Julia Galef's 11 minute talk on the "soldier versus scout mindset" is the perfect follow up to this conversation. The soldier defends a position at all costs, the scout just wants to see what's actually there:

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By the time he was just thirty years old, the Rheumatoid arthritis had taken his hands.

Twisting his fingers so badly he could no longer hold a pen, and for more than a year he could barely get out of bed.

For a young doctor, this should have been the end of the story.

Not this one though, he chose a different direction and decided it was the beginning of a new one.

Govindappa Venkataswamy went on to perform more than a hundred thousand eye operations with his damaged hands, and built what would become the largest eye care provider on earth.

Outside India, most have never heard his name.

They refer to him simply as Dr V.

Dr V. was born in 1918, in a farming village in southern India, and following his education became a doctor in 1944.

Then the arthritis arrived, which ended his army career almost before it began.

When he finally got back on his feet, his fingers were permanently bent and swollen.

So, he did something quite remarkable.

He retrained as an eye surgeon.

He trained himself to hold a scalpel in hands that could barely grip a cup, and had his instruments specially adapted to fit them.

In time he was able to perform more than a hundred cataract operations in a single day.

For years he ran government eye camps across rural India, and everywhere he went he saw the same heartbreak.

People blinded by cataracts.

A condition that a simple ten-minute operation can cure completely.

They remained blind solely because no surgeon could reach them, or because they couldn’t afford the fix.

He couldn't forget those faces and knew he wanted to help.

And help he did.

In 1976, the government forced him to retire.

He was just fifty-eight at the time.

Most would have taken a step back and rested.

Dr V. though?

He simply started over.

He mortgaged his own house, opened an eleven-bed clinic in a rented building in the city of Madurai, he called the clinic ‘Aravind’.

Then, he set himself an almost absurd goal: to eliminate needless blindness.

Not just in one village.

Everywhere.

The puzzle he had to solve was how to reach millions of poor people with surgery they couldn't pay for.

His answer came from an unlikely place.

McDonald's.

He looked at how a hamburger chain delivered the same product, at enormous scale, in any town in the world, and wondered why sight couldn't work the same way.

So he built an assembly line for sight.

Operating rooms with two tables, so a surgeon finished with one patient and shift immediately to the next.

His teams trained to handle all aspects of the surgery itself.

The Doctors performed about two thousand surgeries each year, while the national average at the time was only four hundred.

And the part that made it all work?

Patients who could pay, did.

And their fees covered many of those who couldn't.

There was no means test and no paperwork to prove your poverty.

You simply chose free, subsidised or paid, and walked through the same doors for the same care.

It sounds a bit cold, comparing eye surgery to fast food.

And plenty of people said exactly that at the time.

That is was a “production line for human beings, medicine by the numbers.”

But the actual numbers?

They told a different story.

Aravind's complication rates were as low as the finest hospitals in the world, while treating more people than any of them.

When facing the challenge that imported lenses cost around a hundred dollars and priced the poor out, Dr V built a factory of his own.

The new factory prodcued the same lenses for about ten initially, then just a few dollars.

So they started shipping them to more than a hundred countries.

He ran it like a factory so he could give it away like a gift.

Making compassion affordable to everyone who walked in.

Dr V was a deeply spiritual man, a follower of the philosopher Sri Aurobindo.

He began most of his mornings in meditation, always before the first patient arrived.

To him, the work was a form of worship.

A way of serving something larger than himself, and he expected the same devotion from everyone around him.

He never built wealth from any of it, lived simply and gave the work away.

By the time he died in 2006, Aravind had treated millions of people and performed millions of operations, more than half of them free or heavily subsidised.

Even today, no organisation on earth restores more sight.

And it’s still growing.

The obstacle can become your calling: The hands that could have ended his career are the same hands that gave sight to millions. What feels like the thing that’s holding you back can turn out to be exactly what points you somewhere better.

Don't just help one, build the thing that helps thousands: Plenty of surgeons cure patients. Dr V designed a system that would keep curing them long after he was gone. Compassion goes further when you give it good engineering.

Excellence and access can live together: He refused to believe that good care had to be expensive, or that cheap care had to be poor. He proved you can have both, and dared everyone else to catch up.

I'll be honest here.

I think about my eyes more than most people do probably do.

I wear lenses every single day.

Without them the world turns soft and blurry, and the simplest things become hard.

I know the small flash of panic when I can't find them, and how much I lean on them to do something as ordinary as read my kids a story.

So I have some understanding of what it means to have your sight compromised.

But only a little.

What I’ve never had to face is going blind from something a ten-minute operation could fix, and having no way on earth to reach it.

For millions of people, that was their reality.

Dr V looked at all that needless suffering and decided it was unacceptable.

Then he spent the rest of his days, with hands that could barely hold a scalpel, doing something about it.

It makes my small inconveniences feel even smaller.

It also leaves me with a bigger thought.

The people who change the most lives are rarely the ones who waited to feel ready, or whole, or qualified enough.

They start with what they have, broken hands and all, and they build.

What could you build with what you already have?

Some stories are better seen than told and Dr V’s is one of them. The following video was made by his grand-neice, it’s a but longer at 35 mins but well worh your time:

My wife and I have a short list of shows we genuinely look forward to.

Not the ones we half-watch with one eye on our phones, the ones we plan the whole evening around.

It had been years since anything new earned a place on that list.

Then along came Silo.

We were hooked from the first episode, and we've stayed glued to it, even through the long gaps between seasons.

If you haven't come across it, Silo is Apple TV's dystopian sci-fi thriller, created by Graham Yost and based on Hugh Howey's bestselling Silo novels, which began with Wool.

The premise is simple and brilliant.

The last ten thousand people on earth live in a giant silo buried a mile underground.

The world outside is toxic and deadly.

No one knows who built the silo, or when, or why, and anyone curious enough to start asking tends to regret it.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette, an engineer who tugs at one loose thread and uncovers a mystery far bigger than she could ever have imagined.

The writing is clever in the best possible way.

It's a slow burn that trusts you to keep up, a mystery where every answer cracks open two new questions.

Nothing is handed to you, and that is exactly why it grips you.

And Rebecca Ferguson is phenomenal.

Her Juliette is stubborn, brilliant and completely human, the type of character you'd follow anywhere.

She produces the show as well, which tells you how much she believes in it.

For me, it's the world they've built.

The silo feels genuinely and eerily lived-in.

The concrete stairwell spiralling down a hundred and forty-four levels.

The constant hum of machinery.

The sense that generations have been born, raised and buried inside these walls.

When a story asks you to believe something this strange, the details have to be perfect, and here they are (or pretty close to it).

At some point you stop noticing you're watching science fiction and start feeling like you live there too.

A few things the show has reminded me of:

Some things are worth the wait: We've sat through long gaps between seasons, and the payoff has earned every one. Anticipation is half the pleasure, and we've mostly forgotten that in the age of the binge.

Stay curious: The whole story turns on people brave enough to ask the questions no one else will. Not a bad reminder, even outside a silo.

Sweat the details: The believability comes from a thousand tiny, careful choices. The same is true of most things worth doing well.

There's a special joy in a show that makes you wait.

Something to look forward to, to puzzle over, to pick straight back up the moment a new episode drops.

We've had years of that with Silo, and it’s never once let us down.

The best news? The wait is nearly over.

Season three lands on July 3rd.

And the part that has me genuinely excited: seasons three and four were filmed back to back, with the fourth being the final chapter.

The story is going to get the proper ending it deserves, with no risk of being cut off before it's done (or dragging on too long).

If you've been meaning to give it a go, now is the perfect time.

Two seasons to catch up on, and a brand new one about to drop.

Watching already, or about to start?

Hit reply and let me know what you think.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

You know those times when something in your life feels off?

You’re too busy, too cluttered, things are getting too complicated.

What's the first instinct?

It’s usually to add.

A new app to get organised, or another commitment we're sure will finally get us on top of it all.

We keep reaching for more, when more is actually the problem.

Isaac Newton saw this the other way around, and I tend to agree with him.

He believed the truth of something showed up once you stripped it back to its simplest form.

The clearest answer is usually the plainest one.

Sitting beneath all the noise we've stacked on top of it.

This is wired into us.

Engineering professor Leidy Klotz and his colleagues ran a set of experiments on how we solve problems.

Across study after study, when people were asked to improve something, they overwhelmingly added parts rather than removed them, even when removing was the cheaper and simpler fix.

Subtraction barely registered as an option.

In one experiment, people were asked to stabilise a small Lego structure.

The neat fix was to remove a single block, which was free.

Most paid to add blocks instead.

Klotz lays this out in his book Subtract, and the conclusion is a little unsettling.

Our default setting is more.

More features, more steps, more words, more stuff.

Removing something requires the deliberate act of noticing and then acting, because the option to do so hardly occurs to us naturally.

Newton was attempting to highlight the same human habit centuries earlier.

What's true tends to be simple.

The confusion is the part we bolt on ourselves.

Ask "what can I remove?” first: Before you add a tool, a habit or a step to fix something, look for what you could take away instead. The simpler fix is often the one you skipped past.

Find the one block: When we’re overwhelmed there is usually a single biggest contributor: the one recurring commitment that drains far more than it returns. Take that one thing out before you try to reorganise everything around it.

Say it in half the words: Next time you write an email or explain an idea, cut it down hard. If the meaning survives, the rest was padding. What's left is usually much clearer.

For most of my adult life, my instinct when things got hard was to add.

Longer hours and a fuller calendar, on the assumption that more was somehow better.

The clearest my life has ever felt came from doing the opposite.

At 45, I stepped back from a career I'd spent more than two decades building, and stripped my life back to what actually mattered.

The moment I took the noise away, what I wanted was obvious.

If I’m honest, it had probably been obvious for years.

I just couldn't see it as an option under everything I'd piled on top.

We tend to treat complexity like progress.

We assume the answer has to be elaborate, because the problem feels big.

But more often, the path runs the other way, and the thing between you and a clear head is something you could remove.

So, next time something feels tangled, pause before you add to it.

Look for the one thing you could take away instead.

I'd love to know what you decide to subtract.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

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