I write a lot about honesty on here, but being honest doesn’t mean always keeping your beliefs the same. As I wrote more than 10 years ago, it’s a good thing to be willing to change your mind and it’s often the logical thing to do.
However, changing your mind can sometimes appear as contradictions coming out of your mouth, and it’s indeed a thin line between being willing to change your mind and just being wishy-washy, particularly as you’re working your way through an idea.
In her book “I Never Thought of It That Way“, author Mónica Guzmán shared it like this:
And don’t confuse honesty for a lack of contradiction! If people contradict themselves, they might be revealing their own messiness, not some inability to think straight. A contradiction doesn’t need a correction or confession. Just some curiosity to plumb its depths.
I really work hard to “plumb the depths” of my curiosity, and that can come out as being contradictory at times, particularly when I do it in an open way on this site.
It feels kind of similar to how we watched scientists try to sort out the details of COVID in the early months, or when the SpaceX Starship exploded not long after launched. Those were both looks into processes that we rarely get to see. Have you been around to see a new vaccine being developed in real-time? Did you see the first F-14 and F-16 crash on testing? As we get more media coverage on literally everything, we see more of the process behind the outcome.
If you’re a person that is actively curious about the world around you, it’s ok if you contradict yourself from time to time. When it happens, it just means that it’s time to dig a little deeper and figure out what you really believe.
