There is a saying in Program which goes, "Would you rather be right or happy?" When we first heard this, which for most of us is some time ago, we were taken aback. Were the two things indeed mutually exclusive? But as we worked our way through the Steps, we discovered that in fact they were. When we insist upon being right, we've lost the path to happiness immediately. A Buddhist would say that it's because we want something. We want to be right, and it's the wanting that causes us to suffer. Which means that whether we are right or not simply doesn't matter. The minute it starts to matter, we start to suffer.

In a very limited number of cases, we are not only right but we know that we are right. Yet we'll survive quite nicely as long as it doesn't matter that we're right.

A member of Program says:

In a recent complex stock transaction, it was suddenly suggested that I was attempting to defraud a financial institution. My reaction years ago would have been to start creating a scene, loudly asserting not only my innocence but my outrage at the accusation. But, because of my work on the last three Steps, it just didn't seem to matter. I sat down quietly, knowing that I was right and that it would be discovered that I was right if I was just patient enough, but without any feeling of rancor. Afterwards I realized that it wasn't an issue of whether I was right. It was an issue of whether it was important or not -- and these days, it seems to matter less and less whether I'm right.