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| 24/08/06 | | Strong opinions, weakly held |
One of the my favourite blogs at the moment is Bob Sutton’s Work Matters. He’s an academic at Stanford who has a practical view of organisational issues and the author of the no asshole rule. A phrase that jumped out at me while reading Bob’s post this morning is the advice to have strong opinions, weakly held. Strong opinions encourage you to develop strong arguments for your point of view while holding these opinions weakly enables you to see and hear other people’s ideas and change your opinion as you learn more about the world.
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Comments
I can kinda see where you are going with this but the language needs a bit of tweaking. I cannot immediately tell the difference between a "strong opinion" and a "strongly-held opinion".
Instead of strong opinion:
- Solid?
- Ambitious?
Posted by: Matt Moore at August 28, 2006 11:47 AM
I think the wording works well because of its contradictory nature. A strong opinion is something you believe in. The term 'weakly held' seems to be contradiction because we've just said we have a strong opinion but we are willing to change our minds, and we listen.
Posted by: Shawn Callahan at August 31, 2006 10:39 AM