The Cost of Being Right

There I was, another Zoom meeting, another grid of faces I no longer felt the same about. My camera was on, but I wasn't. Somewhere between the status update and the next agenda item, I realized I had nothing left—no counterpoint, no push-back, no fight. Just silence where conviction used to live.

Early in my career, I was that person—the one with opinions sharp enough to cut. I believed certainty was strength, and I wielded it like a weapon. But I learned, quicker than most, that being right rarely matters if no one wants to build with you anymore. So I softened. I listened more. I held my ideas loosely, made room for others.

What I didn't expect was that letting go of my need to be right wouldn't protect me from everyone else's.

This isn't a story about winning arguments. It's about what happens when you stop fighting, and the room keeps swinging anyway.

The Lesson That Didn't Save Me

I wasn't always easy to work with. Early in my career, I held my opinions like they were the only path forward. If I believed something was the right approach, I dug in. I defended. I pushed.

Then a mentor pulled me aside. The specifics don't matter as much as the message: I was being too firm. There's always more than one way to accomplish a task. Not wrong, necessarily—but rigid. And rigidity, even when correct, builds walls where there should be bridges.

It landed. I started holding my ideas more loosely, making room for approaches that weren't mine. I learned that collaboration isn't about surrendering your perspective—it's about letting it sit alongside others without demanding it win. I thought this would be the key to healthier teams, better work, a longer career.

What I didn't account for was that not everyone gets that conversation. Not everyone wants it.

The Loudest Voice in the Room

I've seen it play out the same way in more rooms than I can count: the loudest voice wins. Not the most thoughtful, not the most experienced, not the one with the clearest data—just the one willing to hold the floor until everyone else gives up.

But there's a quieter version of this that's just as suffocating.

I once joined a team as a staff engineer—a role that comes with the expectation of influence, of shaping technical direction. I was ready to contribute, to listen and lead in equal measure. But it didn't matter. Every decision, every approach, every idea had to pass through one person: the engineer who had built the majority of the application in its early days.

They weren't loud, exactly. They didn't need to be. Their opinion was the default, baked into the culture like an unwritten rule everyone knew not to challenge. They had built the thing, so they owned how it should grow. Forever.

It didn't matter what I brought to the table. It didn't matter what the team thought. Progress moved at the speed of one person's approval, shaped entirely by one person's vision. And if you pushed back? You weren't collaborating—you were threatening the foundation.

So I stopped pushing. I stopped proposing. Eventually, I stopped caring.

The Cost

Here's what no one tells you about being in a room where your voice doesn't matter: it doesn't just affect your work. It rewires you.

I started to feel incompetent. Not disagreed with—incompetent. Tasks I had done a thousand times before suddenly felt impossible. I would sit at my desk, staring at something trivial, unable to start. I paced my office, restless and stuck at the same time. Anxiety crept in, then settled, then stayed.

The worst part? I knew I wasn't incompetent. I had the experience, the track record, the skills. But when every idea gets filtered through someone else's approval, when every contribution gets quietly overwritten, you start to wonder if maybe you've been wrong about yourself all along.

That's the cost of being in a room with someone who always has to be right: eventually, you stop trusting yourself.

It's not dramatic. It's erosion. Slow and steady, until one day you're sitting in a Zoom meeting with your camera on and nothing left inside.

Where Do You Stand?

If any of this sounds familiar, I want you to take a moment.

Maybe you're the one who's been silenced—showing up, contributing, watching your ideas dissolve into someone else's vision. Maybe you've started to doubt yourself in ways you can't explain. If that's you, I need you to hear this: it's not you. The environment you're in is shaping how you see yourself, and that reflection isn't the truth.

Or maybe—and this takes courage to consider—you're the loud voice. The one whose opinions have calcified into defaults. The one who doesn't realize the room has gone quiet because people stopped believing they'd be heard. That's not leadership. That's control. And it's costing you more than you know.

And maybe you're somewhere in between. Watching it happen. Unsure whether to speak up or stay safe.

Wherever you are, you have a choice. Teams don't have to work this way. Conviction doesn't have to come at the cost of collaboration. Being right doesn't have to mean everyone else is wrong.

The best rooms I've been in weren't filled with people who agreed—they were filled with people who knew how to disagree and still build together. People who held their ideas with open hands.

I'm still learning how to find those rooms. How to build them. How to be the kind of voice that makes space instead of taking it.

I hope you are too.

*P.S. I've started to use em-dashes more. I'm trying to be nice to the AI. You know — for when they take over.