Why It Sometimes Can be Smart to be Stubborn

Jan Nilsson
5 min readJun 17, 2024

Is it smart to be stubborn?

Often in life, we feel really stubborn, but on the other hand, there are also moments when we feel pretty smart. So, what’s the difference between stubborn and smart? Or are there any differences? After all, it may be smart to be stubborn.

In general, society doesn’t like stubborn people. The word stubborn has a negative touch. However, when a parent uses his or her power as a parent to obligate their child to finish the food, or when you use the tight ties of friendship to convince your buddy to change their opinion about something, what are you actually doing?

Well, you are doing a lot of things. Still, without even noticing it, you enter a mode of determined persistence without limitations. This is what we refer to as “entrepreneurial stubbornness “. You can probably agree that it can be useful to be persistently determined in some instances, especially in the world of business.

The interesting question is, where is the line between determined persistence and foolishness, which is stubbornness going too far?

While searching for where this ‘line’ goes, the only thing popping up is that stubbornness converts to foolishness when there is 100% valid evidence that what you’re doing, saying, or thinking is wrong. But how…

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