Ask yourself: Is this the hill you want to die on?

You don’t have to fight to the death on every hill you climb.

Photo by Matt Duncan on Unsplash

Every day, we fight.

We fight to live, we fight to get our way, we fight for our relationships and we fight at work. Every day, we fight.

The issue is not so much that we fight a lot, it’s that most of us don’t realize we’re fighting and don’t know which hills we have climbed are important enough to die on.

In battle, hills are typically important pieces of ground that provide strategic advantages if won. It’s important to know which hills are worth climbing and fighting for and which are not. Once you have won a specific hill, are you willing to die to retain it? By choosing this particular hill, could you win the war?

These are all decisions that must be made before you wage a battle for ownership of a hill.

Hence the phrase; “the hill you want to die on.”

I have adopted this idiom in my life and apply it to the battles that I enter into every day.

When my partner and I are arguing over something, inevitably one of us will ask: “Is this the hill you want to die on?” and if one of us answers yes and the other doesn’t, then we give in because it’s more important to the other. If…