Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds--and our own. As Wharton's top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox.
Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.
Prologue
We refresh our wardrobes when they go out of
style and renovate our kitchens when they’re no longer in vogue. When it comes
to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns.
Psychologists call this seizing and freezing.
We laugh at people who still use Windows 95,
yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.
Chapter
1: A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk into Your Mind
Progress is impossible without change; and
those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. —George Bernard
Shaw
Most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That makes sense in a stable world, where we get rewarded for having conviction in our ideas. The problem is that we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.
Rethinking is a skill set, but it’s also a
mindset. We already have many of the mental tools we need. We just have to
remember to get them out of the shed and remove the rust.
As we sit with our beliefs, they tend to
become more extreme and more entrenched. I’m still struggling to accept that
Pluto may not be a planet.
When it comes to our own knowledge and
opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right.
As we think and talk, we often slip into the
mindsets of three different professions: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.
In each of these modes, we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set
of tools. We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we
deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode
when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to
prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re
seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our
constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re
right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we
don’t bother to rethink our own views.
No matter how much brainpower you have, if
you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to
think again. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more
likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing
patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you
might struggle to update your beliefs.
If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t
know is wisdom.
The curse of knowledge is that it closes our
minds to what we don’t know. Good judgment depends on having the skill—and the
will—to open our minds. I’m pretty confident that in life, important habit. Of
course, I might be wrong. If I am, I’ll be quick to think again.
Chapter
2: The Armchair Quarterback and the Impostor
Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,”
blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs
life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a
rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.”
The most effective leaders score high in both confidence and humility. Although they have faith in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses. They know they need to recognize and transcend their limits if they want to push the limits of greatness.
Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses.
Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility
is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.
Chapter
3: The Joy of Being Wrong
The natural sequence of emotions is surprise
(“Really?”) followed by curiosity (“Tell me more!”) and thrill (“Whoa!”). To
paraphrase a line attributed to Isaac Asimov, great discoveries often begin not
with “Eureka!” but with “That’s funny . . .”
To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to
detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful:
detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your
identity.
Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back
at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not
have learned much in the last year.”
When the facts change, I change my opinions.
When you’re wrong, it’s not something to be
depressed about. Say, ‘Hey, I discovered something!’
“People who are right a lot listen a lot,
and they change their mind a lot,” Jeff Bezos says. “If you don’t change your
mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot.” -Jean-Pierre
After all, it doesn’t matter “whose fault it
is that something is broken if it’s your responsibility to fix it,” actor Will
Smith has said. “Taking responsibility is taking your power back.”
Chapter
4: The Good Fight Club
Agreeable people make for a great support
network: they’re excited to encourage us and cheerlead for us. Rethinking
depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people
we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses.
Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about
our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof sh*t detector.” My challenge network is my sh*t detector. I think of it as a good fight club.
“Honest argument is merely a process of
mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see
clearly,”
Chapter
5: Dances with Foes
Exhausting someone in argument is not the
same as convincing him. —Tim Kreider
We won’t have much luck changing other people’s minds if we refuse to change ours. We can demonstrate openness by acknowledging where we agree with our critics and even what we’ve learned from them.
No matter how nicely we ask, other people
don’t always want to dance.
Chapter
6: Bad Blood on the Diamond
The most effective way to help people pull
the unsteady Jenga blocks out of their stereotype towers is to talk with them
in person.
Chapter
7: Vaccine Whisperers and Mild-Mannered Interrogators
Even the devil appreciates being listened
to.”
Listening is a way of offering others our
scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we
care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.
Chapter
8: Charged Conversations
When conflict is cliché, complexity is
breaking news. —Amanda Ripley
Chapter
9: Rewriting the Textbook
No schooling was allowed to interfere with
my education. —Grant Allen
Achieving excellence in school often
requires mastering old ways of thinking. Building an influential career demands
new ways of thinking. In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the
most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts
were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of
rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who
graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the
future’s visionaries,” education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They
typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
That’s what I saw with my straight-A
students: they were terrified of being wrong.
The following year, the class’s favorite idea took that rethinking a step further: the students hosted a day of “passion talks” on which anyone could teach the class about something he or she loved. We learned how to beatbox and design buildings that mesh with nature and make the world more allergy safe. From that point on, sharing passions has been part of class participation. All the students give a passion talk as a way of introducing themselves to their peers. Year after year, they tell me that it injects a heightened level of curiosity into the room, leaving them eager to soak up insights from each of their classmates.
One student put it eloquently: “I need time
for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be
explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.
He invited them to show humility and
curiosity, framing their suggestions in terms of questions like “I’d love to
hear why . . .” and “Have you considered . . .”
Ultimately, education is more than the
information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep
revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.
Chapter
10: That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It
Rethinking is more likely to happen in a
learning culture, where growth is the core value and rethinking cycles are
routine. In learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don’t
know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new routines to
try out.
I ERR, THEREFORE I LEARN
But mindsets aren’t enough to transform a
culture. Although psychological safety erases the fear of challenging
authority, it doesn’t necessarily motivate us to question authority in the
first place. To build a learning culture, we also need to create a specific
kind of accountability—one that leads again about the best practices in their
workplaces.
In performance cultures, people often become
attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the
best, it becomes frozen in time. We preach about its virtues and stop
questioning its vices, no longer curious about where it’s imperfect and where
it could improve. Organizational learning should be an ongoing activity, but
best practices imply it has reached an endpoint. We might be better off looking
for better practices.
Chapter
11: Escaping Tunnel Vision
Sometimes we lack the talent to pursue our
callings professionally, leaving them unanswered; other times there’s little
hope that our passions can pay the bills. “You can be anything you wanna be?!”
the comedian Chris Rock quipped. “Tell the kids the truth. . . . You can be
anything you’re good at . . . as long as they’re hiring.”
Kids might be better off learning about
careers as actions to take rather than as identities to claim. When they see
work as what they do rather than who they are, they become more open to
exploring different possibilities.
"Gotta stay on track."
Just as they make appointments with the
doctor and the dentist even when nothing is wrong, they should schedule
checkups on their careers. I encourage them to put a reminder in their
calendars to ask some key questions twice a year. When did you form the aspirations
you’re currently pursuing, and how have you changed since then? Have you
reached a learning plateau in your role or your workplace, and is it time to
consider a pivot?
Answering these career checkup questions is a way to periodically activate rethinking cycles. It helps students maintain humility about their ability to predict the future, contemplate doubts about their plans, and stay curious enough to discover new possibilities or reconsider previously discarded ones.
Whether we do checkups with our partners,
our parents, or our mentors, it’s worth pausing once or twice a year to reflect
on how our aspirations have changed. As we identify past images of our lives
that are no longer relevant to our future, we can start to rethink our plans.
That can set us up for happiness—as long as we’re not too fixated on finding
it.
We should be careful to avoid getting too
attached to a particular route or even a particular destination. There isn’t
one definition of success or one track to happiness.
At work and in life, the best we can do is plan for what we want to learn and contribute over the next year or two, and stay open to what might come next. To adapt an analogy from E. L. Doctorow, writing out a plan for your life “is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
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