Recent thoughts about conviction

I've been thinking about the idea of conviction recently... How often do I have conviction in my judgements? How does that impact my actions?

The answer is I haven't had a lot of conviction as of late. I've been cultivating, I guess, over the last decade an appreciation of subtlety and nuance. I've been trying to hold humility and the willingness to say "I don't know" as a high value. And these have been quite useful, I think. I've been able to move past some inaccurate views of the world and in general have been happy to be able to see the world in shades of grey.

But I've noticed a downside of this is that I have lost a lot of conviction in my beliefs. Being more aware of the risk of being wrong, the infinite complexities and nuances of the world, has made it seem like having conviction is wrong because I'll inevitably understand a more nuanced view of it in the future.

But I don't think that is quite right. I don't have to choose between seeing the world in shades of grey and having conviction in my beliefs. It's not like there is some law of the universe that says I must. So why did I give up the conviction? For fear of being wrong. For fear of being imperfect. (Spoiler: I'm always going to be imperfect so that's not a very helpful fear to have.) And it worked! By having less conviction, I made fewer strong statements, and was wrong less frequently. But I also stopped learning from being wrong. Being wrong is not bad. Being wrong is great. Being wrong is how you get better at being right more frequently. Deciding not to play the game doesn't get you better at the game.

I want to view the world as infinitely nuanced, complex, and hard to understand. But I also want to sharpen my ability to make judgements about the world. That involves being willing to make strong statements, and adjusting my view of them as I encounter more data.

I'll never be fully right, but I'll have a tool — my own sense of when to have conviction in judgements — that will get sharper with time and is useful to have, even if it leads to being wrong sometimes.

P.S. Well this is my first post without any real editing. Caveat emptor! It's poorly written but I think it's better to poorly write down things that matter to me than to not write anything at all. Also, I don't think I'll get better at writing without writing poorly in the first place. The perfect is the enemy of the good!