How can you have convictions while remaining open to truth?

By the time I was in college, I knew everything. My beliefs about politics and theology and society were firmly fixed. I’d been taught almost everything and I figured out the rest.

Or so I thought.

Eventually, a bit of humility started to erode my arrogance. I finally had to ask myself  how I could have been so lucky to have been born into the only culture and country and religious group to have everything figured out correctly.

When I realized how absurd it was to think that could have been true, I was forced to look at what I believed and ask myself why I believed those things.

I went through a lot of deconstruction of what I believed. The process was painful at times. Eventually, I firmly embraced some of what I’d been taught and rejected other parts of it. This was a terrifying process that forced me to be vulnerable to the scary possibility that I had everything wrong.

Years later, I’m nothing like the person I was when I was young. My values are the same, but many of my beliefs have changed. I’ve realized now that a lot of people believe changing your mind is a sign of weakness or failure.

I’ve come to see that the power of change has given me more joy and freedom and confidence than I ever had when I knew everything. And I couldn’t have experienced that without accepting that I’d been wrong.

The strange thing is that changing my mind has not made me less certain that truth exists. It has made me less certain that I possess it.

Those are two very different things.

There are two opposite errors that seem common in our culture today. Some people believe that whatever they feel deeply and sincerely must be true. Others believe that if they can construct a logical argument that appears internally consistent, their conclusions must be true. Both approaches fail for the same reason. Our feelings can be wrong. Our logic can be wrong. Most importantly, the assumptions upon which our feelings and logic are built can be wrong.

We all begin with certain foundational beliefs about the world. We inherit them from our families, our culture, our religion, our education and our personal experiences. Most of us rarely stop to examine those assumptions because they seem so obvious that we don’t even notice they’re there. Yet entire civilizations have built elaborate systems of thought on assumptions that later turned out to be false. If intelligent people throughout history have been mistaken about important things, what makes me think I’m immune from the same danger?

That realization doesn’t make me doubt the existence of objective reality. It makes me doubt my ability to perfectly perceive it. Reality exists whether I understand it correctly or not. Truth remains true whether I recognize it or not. The challenge is that every one of us experiences reality through imperfect lenses. We interpret the world through our biases, experiences, fears, hopes and assumptions. Some people are more careful observers than others, but none of us sees perfectly. That includes me.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become less interested in defending my beliefs and more interested in testing them. When I was younger, I treated changing my mind as a form of defeat. If someone exposed a flaw in my reasoning, I felt threatened. If facts contradicted my conclusions, I looked for ways to explain them away. Today, I find that reaction almost embarrassing. If my goal is to understand reality as accurately as possible, why would I want to protect an error? Why would I want to cling to a false belief simply because I’ve held it for a long time?

Being corrected still stings. Nobody enjoys discovering that he’s mistaken. But I’d rather endure a moment of embarrassment than spend years believing something that isn’t true. In fact, one of the most liberating realizations of my life has been that I don’t need to be right. I need to be willing to become less wrong.

That sounds like a small distinction, but it changes everything. The person whose identity depends on being right must defend every belief at all costs. New information becomes a threat. Questions become attacks. Contradictory evidence becomes an enemy. The person whose identity is rooted in seeking truth has a different relationship with being wrong. Every mistake becomes an opportunity to learn something. Every challenge becomes a chance to see reality more clearly. Every correction becomes a gift.

The irony is that many people view changing their minds as a sign of weakness. I’ve come to see it as a sign of strength. It takes no courage to spend a lifetime repeating what you’ve always believed. It takes courage to examine your assumptions. It takes courage to admit uncertainty. It takes courage to follow evidence and experience when they lead somewhere unexpected. Most of all, it takes courage to accept that your current understanding may someday need revision.

That doesn’t mean standing for nothing. It doesn’t mean drifting wherever the cultural winds happen to blow. It doesn’t mean treating every idea as equally valid. Some ideas are true. Some ideas are false. Some ways of living lead to flourishing. Others lead to misery and destruction. I believe that as strongly as ever.

But commitment to truth requires something deeper than commitment to my current opinions. It requires the humility to recognize that whenever truth and my beliefs come into conflict, it is my beliefs that must yield. That is the power of change. The willingness to change is not the abandonment of conviction. It is the recognition that truth matters more than my pride.

Every meaningful transformation in my life has begun with the same uncomfortable admission:

I might be wrong.