Even if You’re Right

I interviewed a woman on Zoom about the shop she owns in a small town. We talked about what she sells, who she is, and how it all began.

Then I asked her this:

“What do you think about where you live?”

She UNLOADED.

“It’s terrible,” she said.

The mayor was a crook, the downtown in shambles, and all the other business owners were incompetent. She told me all the things the town was doing that it shouldn’t, and all the things it should be doing that it wasn’t. It was also important to her, she said, to say out loud what was on her mind by making almost daily videos on Facebook as a way to let everyone know how they were screwing everything up.

“You can probably tell I’m a straight shooter,” she said.

A few weeks later, I was in her shop taking photos. She was nice to me, and making small talk, I mentioned something another business owner had said about the foot traffic in town.

“She wouldn’t know,” the woman said. “She hasn’t been here long enough to know what she’s talking about.” She made sure to tell me about how the sidewalks were dirty, how the new businesses weren’t the business the town needed. She told me about how no one was doing anything to help the businesses downtown—including the person who hired me to do marketing for the businesses downtown, who she referred to as “a douchebag.”

“And I said that to his face,” she said. “You can probably tell I’m a straight shooter.”

I wanted to tell her that she was also very alone.

One person I talked to had invested their life savings to restore an empty old building, another opened a coffee shop simply because the town needed one, and a third moved back home from Hawaii to save the family restaurant. Some were in love with what the town was, or what it is, or for what they believed it could become.

The woman who “didn’t know what she was talking about” had moved from a major metropolitan area to the town a few years prior after falling in love with her husband’s hometown, and on weekends, they drive the gravel roads with the top down to smell the farmland and countryside.

“How can you think that’s not just the best thing?” she said.

Communities aren’t just sunshine and rainbows. Speaking only about the positive parts of our places, coupled with the belief that criticism only comes from ignorant and untruthful “naysayers”, is the quickest way for a community to experience a slow death. Communication about what communities don’t do well is a critical part of creating better communities because provided the criticism is true, problems can’t be fixed if they aren’t talked about, and like a leaky pipe or a cavity in a tooth, unfixed problems only become bigger over time. This woman might have been right about everything she was saying: the mayor could be a crook, the downtown could be a wasteland, and she might be surrounded by terrible businesses. I also don’t think she was simply someone complaining to complain, I think what she thought came from a place of legitimately wanting her city to be successful.

But being alone can’t change any of that. She got attention with Facebook videos, clout with a few others looking for a dogpile, the thrill of confrontation—but she doesn’t get to make things better because improving a community requires more than complaints: it takes cooperation, and cooperation means working with other people.

I was talking with a friend thinking about running for City Council, and they wanted my advice. Here’s some of what I said:

“You need a strategy bigger than being angry about what you think is wrong. Anger has a shelf-life. If anger is all you’ve got, people are going to get tired of listening to it if that’s all you’ve got, even if they agree with you and even if you’re right. Anger *can* be necessary and useful for creating momentum around an issue, but it’s like running as fast as you can at the start of a marathon, expecting to keep that speed for 26.2 miles, and blaming other people when you pass out after 100 meters.

If telling people they’re wrong is important to you, tell people they’re important, too. Inspire them. Empower them. Tell even the people you disagree with, ‘We can do it.” You need a team, people working with you to get things done, and that doesn’t happen through anger, even if you’re right.”

Relationships are the gateways to getting things done. Someone else controls the books, someone else has necessary information, someone else has a following, someone else can influence, someone else has the connections, someone else needs to say “yes” for anything to happen, someone else needs to hold up the prophet’s hands. Too much anger for too long or too many complaints too often, and those gates begin to shut—even if you’re right.

Four sixth graders were working on a group project in my classroom. One of them, Megan, was brilliant; not only one of the smartest kids I ever taught, but one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. She once rewrote Harry Potter for a book report.

The rest of her group, however, had considerably less firepower, and eventually her frustration with her partners boiled over into anger. She came to me to complain.

“It’s not my group,” I told her. “If there’s a problem, it’s your problem to fix.”

But instead of rallying her troops, she commandeered the group and did the project entirely by herself.

The group came back the next day, and I gave what they presented an A+ because it was A+ work. After all the projects were presented, I started the rest of the class on an assignment and took the group into the teacher’s lounge to talk.

“How do you guys feel about that A+?” I asked. After a few awkward glances, Sam broke the silence.

“Not good,” he said, saying that he didn’t do anything to deserve it. Two other students said that Megan made them feel dumb and that they weren’t good enough to help.

“They would have screwed it all up,” Megan said.

“Maybe,” I said. “And you did get an A+, so mission accomplished, right?” She nodded, but knew where this was going.

I asked the three other students that, considering Megan got them all an A+, if they would want to work with her again.

All of them said no.

I asked Megan if she thought that she might end up facing a project or problem where she would need someone’s help, even though she aced this one.

“This one was easy, but the next one may not be,” she said. “So, yes.”

So we talked about gaining trust, earning respect, and building a team—and then I told them to redo their project, together.

Changing a community is a group project: you might be right, but if you’re alone, you’re wrong.

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