Read Danny Meyer’s Motivating Speech on ‘the Irrelevancy of Being Right’
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Highlights
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The most important lesson of my professional career happened right then, three months after being in business, in terms of the irrelevancy of being right. I wasn’t right; he wasn’t right; I wasn’t wrong; he wasn’t … it didn’t matter. No one’s ever right. No one’s always right, that’s for sure. The only thing that was truly relevant was that he needed to feel heard.
- The whole point is that we waste so much energy, so much effort on being right.
- Think about not only the irrelevancy of being right, but the danger of being right.
- But I would say that the best to use a policy is to think of it as a guideline, and to use it as an opportunity to break that policy in the name of hospitality.
- It had a happy ending, but can you imagine the energy that went into being right, instead of just doing the right thing in the first place? We’re all capable of so much more than that.
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Being right was something that we were taught was the ultimate pinnacle of knowledge, and there’s a reason, culturally, that so many of us care so deeply about being right. But it’s time to get rid of that. It’s no longer the currency that separates who does the really great work in life from who doesn’t. Right now, there’s no excuse to not get the knowledge stuff right. It’s there for everyone to have.
- If there’s one thing that frustrates me, more than anything, about the notion of being right, it’s that being right, too often, gets in the way of being generous. Being right is too often used as a way to protect us from doing the thing that will actually most serve us. If I can leave you with one thought, it’s: Forget being right. It’s completely fucking irrelevant.