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I have been tying my shoes the 麻豆精品 S渨rong 麻豆精品 S� way for over 30 years.

Let me explain: I 麻豆精品 S檓 in kindergarten, and our teacher is teaching us to tie shoes. I don 麻豆精品 S檛 get it. I can 麻豆精品 S檛 do it. I try the floppy cardboard foot with the laces woven through. I try my own shoes. Either way, the rabbit won 麻豆精品 S檛 go around the tree or through the hole, or whatever it is the rabbit is supposed to do. Either way, the laces won 麻豆精品 S檛 tie. My teacher chides those who get it wrong, and I don 麻豆精品 S檛 want to be chided.

Then, it hits me. I don 麻豆精品 S檛 have to tie my shoes my teacher 麻豆精品 S檚 way. I just have to make it look like I tied my shoes her way. I tie a knot. I make two loops. I knot those loops, and, voila, laces tied.

Decades later, my fraud would be vindicated when a scientific study, 麻豆精品 S淭he roles of impact and inertia in the failure of a shoelace knot, 麻豆精品 S� (I swear I am not making this up) would prove once and for all that the way we 麻豆精品 S檙e taught to tie shoes as children is careless, inefficient and leaves laces prone to loosening. My impromptu method, devised to avoid getting yelled at by an impatient teacher, turned out to be the smarter, more efficient method after all. Sometimes stubbornness isn 麻豆精品 S檛 such a bad thing.

I 麻豆精品 S檓 talking about the times your method isn 麻豆精品 S檛 wrong, merely different, when different can be a good thing.

First, though, let me define my terms. When I say stubbornness, I 麻豆精品 S檓 not talking about ambition, grit or the many characteristics under the umbrella of perseverance for which most people already hold the utmost admiration. Nor am I referring to the kind of stubbornness surrounding strict adherence to a suspect or outdated tradition, times when the stubborn individual might be better served by evolution. No, I 麻豆精品 S檓 talking about the need, at times, to fly in the face of unfounded tradition. I 麻豆精品 S檓 talking about resilience when you 麻豆精品 S檙e waiting for the world to catch up with your way of thinking. I 麻豆精品 S檓 talking about the times your method isn 麻豆精品 S檛 wrong, merely different, when different can be a good thing.

Maybe shoelaces are a silly example. Here are some better ones:

Swedish pro golfer Jesper Parnevik, one of the finest golfers in the world, freely admits to holding his clubs all wrong.

麻豆精品 S淢y knuckles go white, 麻豆精品 S� he says in an interview with Golf magazine. 麻豆精品 S淚 麻豆精品 S檝e putted with a glove forever, but I 麻豆精品 S檝e worn putter grips all the way down to the metal. That 麻豆精品 S檚 a little weird. 麻豆精品 S� Weird may be the word, but that weirdness hasn 麻豆精品 S檛 kept Parnevik from netting over $15 million in career earnings on the PGA Tour.

Or consider iconic painter Frida Kahlo. As art historian Gannit Ankori points out in Imaging Her Selves: Frida Kahlo’s Poetics of Identity and Fragmentation, Kahlo, in her lifetime, was known mostly as the eccentric wife of painter Diego Rivera. She died unappreciated and virtually unknown outside of Mexico before several books and retrospectives resurrected her work and shined a long overdue spotlight on her art. But living in Rivera 麻豆精品 S檚 shadow didn 麻豆精品 S檛 keep Kahlo from completing a staggering 143 paintings before she died at the age of 47.

Parnevik and Kahlo are outliers, you might argue. Consider, then, something that most of us do most days: type.

Numerous experiments, including Finland 麻豆精品 S檚 Aalto University study 麻豆精品 S淗ow We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing, 麻豆精品 S� have shown that self-taught typists can type just as fast with as few as six fingers as professional typists, trained under the traditional touch-typing method, who type with 10. What matters, in the end, isn 麻豆精品 S檛 the 麻豆精品 S渂est 麻豆精品 S� method but muscle memory and commitment to a single typing style.

Whether famous or workaday, sometimes we must work against conventional wisdom in order to achieve a desired outcome.

Whether famous or workaday, sometimes we must work against conventional wisdom in order to achieve a desired outcome.

Stubbornness, of course, is risky. There 麻豆精品 S檚 the risk that holding your club your way will injure your back. There 麻豆精品 S檚 the risk that you 麻豆精品 S檒l paint your way into obscurity. There 麻豆精品 S檚 the risk that you 麻豆精品 S檒l type your way and flunk that typing-speed test. Always there 麻豆精品 S檚 the risk that your way is not the better way, that things are one way for a reason, that you 麻豆精品 S檙e making things harder for yourself than they have to be. Always, always there 麻豆精品 S檚 the risk that you 麻豆精品 S檙e wrong.

As leadership consultant Muriel Maignan Wilkins points out, stubbornness carries with it the risk of Pyrrhic victory. Proving a thing can be done your way doesn 麻豆精品 S檛 necessarily prove your way was best. In short, if you 麻豆精品 S檙e stubborn about everything, you 麻豆精品 S檙e doing stubbornness all wrong. As Wilkins notes, there are times when it 麻豆精品 S檚 far better to listen to others, synthesize ideas, consider tradition, stay flexible, compromise, and even admit when you 麻豆精品 S檙e mistaken.

My point, then, is simple but no less profound for being so, I hope. Despite platitudes and T-shirts, movie quotes and what passes for wisdom these days, there 麻豆精品 S檚 rarely one right way to do a thing. Where a prevailing method reigns, there are nearly always practitioners achieving at high levels in opposition to the dominant or 麻豆精品 S渂est practices 麻豆精品 S� methodology.

In other words, just because there are many ways to do a thing wrong doesn 麻豆精品 S檛 mean there 麻豆精品 S檚 only one way to do a thing right. And sometimes your way is just waiting to become the new dominant way of doing a thing, as when American athlete Dick Fosbury, dismissed early on as the 麻豆精品 S渨orld 麻豆精品 S檚 laziest high jumper, 麻豆精品 S� won the 1968 Olympic gold medal with his signature 麻豆精品 S淔osbury Flop 麻豆精品 S� and changed the face of the sport forever.

All of which is good news for me. After all, at 40 years old, I only use seven fingers to type, and I still tie my shoes my way.

David James Poissant is an associate professor at the University of Central Florida where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.聽 He can be reached at David.Poissant@ucf.edu.

The UCF Forum is a weekly series of opinion columns presented by UCF Communications & Marketing. A new column is posted each Wednesday at http://today.ucf.edu and then broadcast between 7:50 and 8 a.m. Sunday on WUCF-FM (89.9). The columns are the opinions of the writers, who serve on the UCF Forum panel of faculty members, staffers and students for a year.