What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?

I don’t want to start off by giving the wrong impression when I say something along the lines of “I’ve never changed my mind.” What I really want to call out is that I’ve never seen myself as, nor acted like I was, an absolute authority on a topic or issue only to be corrected later and have changed my mind. I might approach a situation with a measure of certainty, but I always leave myself open for constructive criticisms and conversations because I recognize that I might be working with incomplete information, and the only way to improve myself and my knowledge is to adapt and learn.

So, rather than answer the question relating to an external topic or issue, I’m going to focus on something internal to myself.

For a long while in my early to mid 20’s I thought I was good at a certain type of video game, First Person Shooters. I played a lot of Halo: Reach on the Xbox, and eventually switched to PUBG when I learned about the burgeoning genre of Battle Royale games. I knew for a fact there were always better players in the world, I had friends that would regularly stomp me in these games (not without a fight, though) so it wasn’t always surprising when I’d lose. That didn’t stop me from pinning my lackluster performance on strangers on the Internet by claiming they were cheating at these games, because that was still a rampant issue even back then.

At some point, though, I did eventually change my mind about something in this area. Not that people weren’t cheating and were just flat out better. Not that the developers had faulty matchmaking algorithms. Nothing like that.

What I did was change my mind on how much I staked my own internal self-worth on my skill at these games. I stopped treating it all like it was a big deal, because in the grand scheme of things in life, it’s not.

I changed my mind about this silly internal struggle with myself that I could do better at something that really shouldn’t be aggravating me, that I should be having fun and enjoying myself. The restraints were gone and this allowed me to explore new genres of games without feeling stuck playing the same one game over and over. I found new friends, new interests, new perspectives, and new hobbies. I was learning and growing as a person again.