Common ground
One of the characteristics of every fight or battle is that they happen at a particular place and everyone knows about it. There is no chance that opponent A will go to another place than opponent B and they will have a fight.
If you are not in one place together, there is no fight and there can be no victory.
When we argue, though, being at completely different places is really common. No one takes time to figure things out and to establish common ground before starting an argument, we just assume things and rush forward.
When people are talking about some abstract things like ego, happiness, success or whatever they don’t usually spend time figuring out what those terms mean to everyone and assume that you share the same meaning.
But that is often wrong, we don’t have the same understanding of things. And that is how most of our argument is going, you are fighting in a field A and your opponent is 20 miles away in a field B. And you fight viciously. Accept, you make no progress and achieve nothing, and just waste your time.
Establishing common ground is the first prerequisite of a productive argument.
