Cognitive Debt and the Cost of Staying Wrong

# The Big Idea Being wrong is unavoidable. The real damage comes from allowing a bad assumption to shape everything you build on top of it. ## The flattering version A few years ago, we sold smpl, the coworking software company I had built with two close friends. An acquisition gives you a tidy ending. It becomes easy to look back at the decisions you made and imagine that they must have been good ones because, eventually, things worked out. I know better. When I think about smpl now, I see plenty of moments when I was wrong and dug my heels in for far too long. My teammates sometimes saw things more clearly than I did. Our customers gave us signals that I dismissed or explained away. I became attached to my own ideas, and that attachment cost us time, strained important relationships, and made our product worse. smpl was acquired despite some of my decisions, not because of all of them. ## Cognitive debt Technical debt accumulates when you take shortcuts today and leave the…