Don’t try to look smart, be smart!

Being willing to let go of “credits” for someone else’s sake can be powerful.

Accepting willingly to not “be right” and force your point of view or reasoning on others can help them find answers by themselves. We tend to be very proud when we find something interesting and we want to share it. That’s awesome. The problem is when someone tells you about something new and shiny they learned that you already knew about and you start saying “yeah, I know” or “I told you about this X weeks ago”. 

I could be wrong here but I believe that reminding people about how right you are might diminish their zeal to try and learn themselves. They could end up relying on your answers or just ignoring them: in both cases, it doesn’t promote growth.

Overall, adopting a new way of thinking and letting others talk to you about that new thing they discovered (even if you already know about it through and through) is not easy to do (especially if it’s your kid talking to you) but I strongly believe that the growth of everyone outweighs the individuals. 

If we’re not careful, we could hurt their self-esteem in the process and that’s probably not what we intended to do in the first place.

Let’s teach each other new information but let’s not keep reminding everyone that we “already know that”.