When working with certain professionals, I prefer that my practitioners have gray hair. Included on this list are airline pilots, neurosurgeons, lawyers, psychotherapists, CEOs, and football coaches (yes, you read that right). 

It doesn’t matter if they’re male, female, or identify as neither or both. I simply feel better if they have some gray hair on their head. 

So what’s at the root of my obsession with gray hair? 

The Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Niels Bohr observed that “there are two kinds of truth – small truths and great truths. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.” 

That’s why an atom can behave as both a particle and a wave at exactly the same time. 

The primary form through which life’s most profound truths express themselves is paradox. Gray hair is nature’s way of reminding us that the world is never simply black or white but always shows up as some particular shade of gray. 

Such insight can come to us in our 20s, 30s, or 40s, of course, but far more often this wisdom reveals itself only after we’re well into our 50s, 60s, or 70s. 

Skillful leaders learn to thrive within the tension between opposing truths. This capacity enables them to exercise wise judgement and generate solutions that are truly creative. 

Rather than giving in to the quick, easy fix of compromise, successful leaders soon learn the importance of doubling down and working harder to discover some third truth that transcends the obvious compromise. 

“We lose the benefit of the unique ideas at the two poles when we compromise for middle ground,” writes author Peter Block. “The best outcomes emerge in the effort to understand the truth in both sides.”

It’s painful – not to mention futile – to see the world simply as black or white, which is why I’ve come to so appreciate those of us who have lived long enough to sport some gray hair. Viewing our or another’s take on the world as right or wrong, informed or uninformed, or progressive or reactionary limits our understanding of the world’s complexity and, ultimately, impoverishes our lives in ways too numerous to count.