On being right

My favourite Stack Overflow answer is for a deleted question. The question was off-topic by the site's rules, which steer away from opinions and possible controversy and towards the purely factual, so deleting it was right. But.

The question (this one, visible only if you have ten thousand internet points) was what real life good habits has programming given you? and the answer I so appreciate was by Robert Rossney, who wrote:

I no longer equate thinking I'm right about something with actually being right about it.

It's now very easy for me to entertain the thought that I may be wrong even when I feel pretty strongly that I'm right. Even if I've been quite forceful about something I believe, I'm able to back down very quickly in the face of contradicting evidence. I have no embarrassment about admitting that I was wrong about something.

That all came from decades of working in a discipline that mercilessly proves you to be mistaken a dozen times a day, but that also requires you to believe you're right if you're going to make any progress at all.