A Defense of Slow Conviction
We change our minds too quickly now, and mistake it for open-mindedness. Some beliefs are worth the discomfort of holding.
There is a fashionable humility that dresses itself up as virtue: the readiness to abandon any position the moment it becomes inconvenient. We call it being open-minded. In my experience it is often just being weightless — the mind reduced to a weathervane, turning with whatever wind spoke last.
A conviction worth having is one you have paid for — in thought, in friction, in the willingness to be wrong in public and stay to defend your reasoning anyway. Such beliefs should be hard to acquire and, for that reason, hard to surrender. The mind that updates instantly on every new signal is not wise. It is simply the last thing that was said to it.
Hold your beliefs loosely, we are told. But a belief held loosely enough was never really a belief. It was a mood.
Written by
Vatsal Gaonkar
Finance & AI Transformation Advisor · Oracle ACE Director
Vatsal Gaonkar is a Finance & AI Transformation leader with more than two decades spent aligning people, process, and technology. An Oracle ACE Director and advisor to C-suite executives, he writes about Autonomous Finance, agentic AI, and what he calls Abundance-Based Leadership and the Infinite Improvement mindset — treating innovation as a journey rather than a destination.
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