What to do when everyone else is wrong
Disagree and commit? That's weak: more like disagree and commit to being a victim for the rest of the project
There was a small disagreement while figuring out how to build your current project.
You thought it should be built a certain way, so let’s call this the Righteous Way (TRW). Other people wanted to do it another way, let’s call this way The Unbelievably Wrong Way That is A Huge Mistake and Irrationally Hurts Your Feelings (TUWWTIAHMAIHYF).
The Argument
Not everyone remembers the details of the disagreement, but it was essential. To you, at least.
It had to do with the system's architecture. You wanted a beautifully crafted, fully baked design upfront, and they wanted to ship something simple and see what happened when people started using it—or the opposite. Maybe it was about a particular tool or process or using or misusing a particular technology. Maybe it was about what time the standup meeting should be or who should be there.
There were some meetings about it, you made your case, but it went the other way. Or maybe there were meetings about it, and you never got to make your case. Either way, you ended up on the wrong side and TRW lost out to TUWWTIAHMAIHYF. The people who seemed to be on your side have now deserted to the other side and are working hard to make TUWWTIAHMAIHYF a huge success.
Cowards!
Project Activities
You have much better things to do:
search for opportunities to make insightful comments about how great TRW is during TUWWTIAHMAIHYF meetings
search for evidence of TRW working on other projects that have nothing to do with this project
document TRW and its pros and cons, and read these out loud to your pet lizards (as practice for The Meeting In Which You Will be Vindicated)
working on TUWWTIAHMAIHYF, but in a very TRW manner, such that it is as TRW-y as you can get away with
document some “potential things to look out for” with TUWWTIAHMAIHYF (ways that it might fail) in a Word document that is currently 37 pages long
(trying to get onto another project) || (trying to avoid being put onto another project against your will)
The power of faith
Your strong conviction on TRW remains true because you aren’t taking in any new information at this time. Your commitment to TRW is so strong that it is blind faith. With faith, you must accept that no truth will ever erase the need for faith, so truth must not matter as much as faith.
Admitting that TRW is either not that important or isn’t the best approach would make all those break-room speeches and long emails you have written a waste of time. And that would make you a little bit of a loser. Can’t have that. Dive deeper into this approach, associate it with your identity, and pause learning for a while and focus on how angry and slighted you feel. New information is useless against the power of TRW anyway. There is no greater fury than righteousness.
The Future
But you have to do something, so you plug away at TUWWTIAHMAHYF. One day, the fury seems to have lessened. As the future arrives day by day, you start to research new technologies, find a new Right Way (TNRW) to do things and start to see the errors in your old TRW ways. You aren’t sure how TUWWTIAHMAHYF turned out, so you can’t learn from anything that happened there.
You also haven’t learned how to communicate your ideas better, how to learn from mistakes, or even how to determine what everyone’s goals are, but now you have experience. Experience with feeling smarter than, more informed than, with being the victim. And since practice matters, even if it is accidental, and we primarily remember emotions, you will move forward in life with this feeling of being right even if the rest of the world is wrong.
And the next time there is an argument, you will be ready.