I have been in a number of fights, and have good memories of them – that sounds messed up – let me explain.

Competition, whether in sports or other areas of life, can be intense, even brutal, but there is a fun side to it. Fighting is a competition, it’s like a physical chess match, pushing you to strategize and give your all. The reason why most of my fights had positive outcomes was because I got to experience this exhilarating situation, no serious harm was done, and surprisingly, almost all the people I fought with became my friends. There are a couple notable exceptions, which brings us to the dark side of fighting.

The Downside of Fighting

Fighting—whether physical, verbal, or emotional—often stems from anger or misunderstanding. These conflicts can cause real harm, and most of them are unnecessary. Life is hard enough without us adding more pain by attacking each other over issues that usually don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

And you can trace the reasons for any fight back to the differing ideas or beliefs, which led to the fight. Whether over something trivial like which sports team is better, or something more personal like boundaries or relationships. Think of some fight you were in, how did your beliefs about the issue conflict with the other person’s?

Each person has to decide for themselves what ideas are or are not worth fighting for, and it seems like a straight-forward calculation to make: consider all the positive results to be gained and the probability of reaching them, then subtract all the negatives you may experience because of the fight to determine if the fight would be worth it.

Many physical and emotional fights are more about taking a shot at a person we are angry with, and with this being the only positive result sought, the fight is a negative investment. So many of the physical and emotional fights we engage in only have the potential to bring shallow positive results, but deep and impactful negative consequences, making many of our fights a foolish investment. However, there are some fights you would be a fool to avoid, and will certainly suffer more for doing so.

Let the Weak Ones Die

Throughout history, people have fought each other, whether on playgrounds, in family disagreements, or even in global conflicts, but the battles and damages between people really begin in battling ideas.

Whether you enjoy or hate fights, there is a situation demanding a fight to the finish, and this fight brings very impactful positive benefits – for both sides – far outweighing the negative side of the fight. How is this possible? By keeping the fight between the ideas.

By keeping the fight between the ideas, we can respectfully engage with different perspectives, allowing ideas to be tested, allowing people on both sides of an argument to grow healthier in their life choices by watching weak or flawed ideas get beaten and dropped, and the stronger, accurate ideas rise up. This type of fight leads to positive outcomes because it’s focused on seeking truth to win better personal choices, rather than trying to win a personal arguments.

In fact, not regularly holding fights between ideas opens you up personally to negative consequences, and can even bring the highest level of negative consequences globally.

The Growth You’ll Experience May Surprise You

Allowing ideas to challenge one another respectfully through supporting evidence and logical reflection, literally turns impending losers to winners. A person allowing their ideas to fight, and watches their ideas lose, has the opportunity to be the biggest winner – their life can improve the most – if they are wise enough to remove the inaccurate idea from their life and move forward with the accurate one.