I read a piece this week by a cookbook author I adore, Katie Parla, about a pasta shop in Gloucester, Massachusetts, run by a woman named Danielle who has an opinion about everything. The correct flour. The right shape for your sauce. A better olive oil than the one you’re using right now, guaranteed. Katie wrote that she meant this as the deepest compliment, and by the end of the piece, so did I.
It made me think about a man I once lived with who had some very strong opinions. That would be my father.
His work was ironmongery, not just any locks, handles, and knobs, but the finest. The pieces were works of art, and holding them felt sensual. But his opinion did not stop there. Installing them required a similar level of precision and care. When he talks about locks and handles, his voice changed register. He is not selling anything. He simply cannot pass a badly installed door without something in him tightening. I witnessed this hundreds of times.
I’ve met versions of my father in boardrooms. The operations lead who won’t let a sloppy process pass because “sloppy now becomes catastrophic later.” The founder who fights you on a font choice like it’s a hill worth dying on. We tend to file these people under difficult. Sometimes they are. But sometimes what we’re calling difficult is just fire we don’t recognize, because we’ve never cared about anything the way they care about this.
That doesn’t mean every strong opinion deserves the floor. Plenty of loud people are just loud. Conviction without craft is noise, and I’ve sat across from enough of it to know the difference matters.
But an opinion that’s been earned, through years of doing the thing badly before doing it well, through obsessing over the part nobody else noticed, is a different animal entirely. Danielle didn’t wake up with taste. She built it, ingredient by ingredient, relationship by relationship. My father didn’t inherit reverence. He earned it one door at a time.
So when someone on your team won’t let something go, the question isn’t whether they’re being difficult.
It’s whether they’ve earned the right to be.
