On Being Hard-Headed
I admit it. I am hard-headed – always have been. When my Dad had his buddies over for pinochle on weeknights, they would stand at the doorway to my bedroom so they could watch me, on hands and knees, rock back and forth in my crib, hitting my head on the headboard and moving the crib several feet across the room.
We associate being hard-headed with being stubborn. I’m guilty, as other experiences also attest. Until college, I played baseball on various teams. That was a mistake that a more sensible person would have avoided. My position was right field, and in my last year my batting average matched the number on my jersey: “00.” I was never good in the outfield, it being a tricky position for someone with no depth perception. The ball would either sail over my head or drop 30 feet in front of me, depending on which way I guessed I should run. My batting average was decent, until opposing pitchers learned to throw a curve ball. The best that could be said about my appearances at the plate then is that they made for amusing (to others) swings.
Pickup games of tackle football were a little more suited to my eyesight, though you have to be pretty hard-headed to play against people six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier – especially without protective gear. In college, I majored in chemistry, which I came to hate by my second year. Nevertheless, I stuck with it to the end. Have I used it since? No. Well, almost “no.” My first paid job after graduation was cleaning up the chemistry lab I had just left.
My first supervisory job was another exercise in hard-headedness. Encouraged to give my small staff leeway in their jobs, I nevertheless micro-managed them to the point that my secretary resigned because she could not take it.
Just the same, being hard-headed can sometimes be useful. Living in Virginia in the early 1980s, I recommended a new elementary school be named after Martin Luther King, Jr. A local politician warned me the “timing was not right” and an anonymous caller threatened me and my family. Yet I persisted. The building became the first school in the state to be named in King’s honor.
Shortly after retiring from a career in public service, I decided that federal civil servants who die in the line of duty should have a U.S. flag for their burial, the same honor rightly accorded to members of the military. Since that would take an act of Congress, I was told the odds were, well, somewhere very close to zero. In 2011, the Civilian Service Recognition Act was signed into law after being passed by both the House and Senate without a dissenting vote – though I admit a key reason was that Republicans and Democrats had been at each other in such vicious attacks that they were desperate for something they could agree on.
There are lessons in all this, I think, as I have struggled to get them through my hard head. Stubbornness is a virtue, but only if you pick the right thing to be stubborn about and do it in the right way. Anchoring your decisions in core values helps. Don’t be hard-headed about things that don’t really, really matter. Of course, this requires thinking, not just digging in. In that sense, hard-headedness should be viewed as a skill to be judiciously applied rather than a character trait one is unable to change. Part of that skill involves exposing oneself to contrary opinions. A hard head without an open mind is a path to mistakes, embarrassment and damage to others.
Hard-headedness can be particularly bad when combined with hard-heartedness. Being open to the impact of your willfulness on others matters. Persevering leads to hollow victories when it fails to consider the importance of preserving relationships. It is those ruined relationships that will often turn victory into future defeat.
Hard-headedness is best applied with doses of humility and humor. Stubbornness when matched with unwarranted overconfidence is a prescription for tragedy, as Hitler found out when he ignored his generals and invaded Russia. Inflexibility without the ability to laugh at oneself ensures that the inevitable defeats that come with living will not be put into perspective or lead to learning.
Progress very often requires hard-headedness. Few victories for social justice, for example, are won without it. Those who prefer the status quo are also hard-headed. As Dr. King so aptly put it: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force.” Very importantly he then added: “Do to us what you will and we will still love you.”
“Be reasonable” those who find me hard-headed sometimes say. It’s a caution I have learned to use to make me rethink where I’m going. But if convinced I have good reasons to forge ahead, I recall words from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Photo Credit: Zoltan Tasi - unsplash.com
