👉 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55539565-think-again

Notes

Part 1: Individual rethinking

About updating our own views

A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician and a Scientist walk into your mind

Note 1

Research shows that when people are resistant to change, it helps to reinforce what will stay the same. Visions for change are more compelling when they include visions of continuity. Although our strategy might evolve, our identity will endure.

The armchair quarterback and the Impostor: Finding the sweet spot of confidence

The Armchair Quarterback

The term “armchair quarterback” refers to a person who criticizes or gives advice from the sidelines without actively participating in the game. In the context of decision-making and learning, an armchair quarterback mindset involves believing that we have all the answers or solutions without seeking additional information, feedback, or perspectives. This attitude can lead to overconfidence and closed-mindedness, preventing us from considering new ideas or adapting our beliefs in the face of new evidence.

The Impostor

The concept of the “impostor” centers around the feeling of inadequacy or the fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite evidence of competence or accomplishments. The impostor mindset can prevent individuals from sharing their ideas, seeking feedback, or taking risks due to a persistent belief that they are not good enough or deserving of success. This fear of failure or rejection can hinder personal growth and learning opportunities.

Note 2

Let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence

Note 3

What he (David Oddsson) lacked is a crucial nutrient for the mind: humility. The antidote to getting stuck on Mount Stupid is taking a regular dose of it. “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.”

The Narcissist Test

The joy of being wrong: The thrill of not believing everything you think

How To Acquire Wisdom
Note 1

Separate opinions from identity

My past self was Mr. Facts-I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder 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.”

The second kind of detachment is separating your opinions from your identity. I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to see a doctor whose identity is Professional Lobotomist, send your kids to a teacher whose identity is Corporal Punisher, or live in a town where the police chief’s identity is Stop-and-Frisker. Once upon a time, all of these practices were seen as reasonable and effective

Note 2

Who you are should be a question of what you value and not what you believe

On prediction
Note 3

We should laugh at ourselves:

If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions seriously, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously. Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the happier we tend to be.* Instead of beating ourselves up about our mistakes, we can turn some of our past misconceptions into sources of present amusement

Note 4

Change your mind frequently

“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.”

The good fight club: The psychology of constructive conflict

Note 1

Absence of conflict ist not harmony, it’s apathy

Types of conflicts

Relationship conflict vs task conflict

Relationship Conflicts

Relationship Conflict refers to personal, interpersonal disagreements among team members, often rooted in personal animosity, jealousy, or other emotional issues. Such conflicts are characterized by a focus on individuals’ characteristics rather than the task at hand, leading to a toxic work environment, reduced team cohesion, and impaired group performance. Grant emphasizes the detrimental effects of relationship conflicts on team collaboration and productivity, suggesting that they should be minimized or resolved to maintain a healthy workplace.

Task Conflicts

Task Conflict, on the other hand, involves disagreements about the work itself, such as differences in opinions, ideas, and approaches to achieving a common goal. Unlike relationship conflicts, task conflicts can be beneficial to teams when managed properly. They encourage diverse thinking, creativity, and reevaluation of ideas, contributing to better decision-making and innovation. Grant advocates for embracing task conflicts in a constructive manner, fostering an environment where dissenting opinions are valued and explored rather than suppressed.

Part 2: Interpersonal rethinking

Opening other people’s minds

Dances with foes: How to win debates and influence people

Note 1

A debate is more like a dance

A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the rope. It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed, negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind. If you try too hard to lead. your partner will resist. If you can adapt your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to end up in rhythm

On to many strong arguments

As the negotiators started discussing options and making proposals, a second difference emerged. Most people think of arguments as being like a pair of scales: the more reasons we can pile up on our side, the more it will tip the balance in our favor. Yet the experts did the exact opposite: They actually presented fewer reasons to support their case. They didn’t want to water down their best points. As Rackham put it, “A weak argument generally dilutes a strong one.”

Skilled vs average negotiators

By category:

Vaccine whisperers and mild-mannered interrogators: How the right kind of listening motivates people to change

Motivational interviewing
Books

Part 3: Collective rethinking

Creating communities of lifelong learners

Charged conversations: Depolarizing our divided discussions

Skeptics vs deniers

It’s especially important to distinguish skeptics from deniers. Skeptics have a healthy scientific stance: They don’t believe everything they see, hear, or read. They ask critical questions and update their think ing as they gain access to new information. Deniers are in the dismis sive camp, locked in preacher, prosecutor, or politician mode: They don’t believe anything that comes from the other side. They ignore or twist facts to support their predetermined conclusions. As the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry put it in a plea to the media, skepticism is “foundationalto the scientific method,” whereas denial is “the a priori rejection of ideas without objective consideration,”*

*Climatologists go further, noting that within denial there are at least six different categories: arguing that (1) COa is not increasing. (2) even if CO2 is increasing, warming is not happening: (3) even if warming is happening, it’s due to natural causes; (4) even if humans are causing warming, the impact is minimal; (5) even if the human impact is not trivial, it will be beneficial; and (6) before the situation becomes truly dire, we’ll adapt or solve it. Experiments suggest that giving science deniers a public platform can backfire by spreading false beliefs, but rebutting their arguments or their techniques can help.

Part 4: Conclusion

Actions for impact

Individual rethinking

  1. Develop the Habit of Thinking Again

    1. Think like a scientist. When you start forming an opinion, resist the temptation to preach, prosecute, or politick. Treat your emerging view as a hunch or a hypothesis and test it with data. Like the entrepreneurs who learned to approach their business strategies as experiments, you’ll main- tain the agility to pivot.

    2. Define your identity in terms of values, not opinions. It’s easier to avoid getting stuck to your past beliefs if you don’t become attached to them as part of your present self-concept. See yourself as someone who val- ues curiosity, learning, mental flexibility, and searching for knowledge.As you form opinions, keep a list of factors that would change your mind.

    3. Seek out information that goes against your views. You can fight confirma tion bias, burst filter bubbles, and escape echo chambers by actively en- gaging with ideas that challenge your assumptions. An easy place to start is to follow people who make you think-even if you usually disagree with what they think.

  2. Calibrate Your Confidence

    1. Beware of getting stranded at the summit of Mount Stupid, Don’t confuse confidence with competence. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a good re minder that the better you think you are, the greater the risk that you’re overestimating yourself and the greater the odds that you’ll stop im proving. To prevent overconfidence in your knowledge, reflect on how well you can explain a given subject.

    2. Harness the benefits of doubt. When you find yourself doubting your ability, reframe the situation as an opportunity for growth. You can have confidence in your capacity to learn while questioning your current solu- tion to a problem. Knowing what you don’t know is often the first step toward developing expertise.

    3. Embrace the joy of being wrong. When you find out you’ve made a mis- take, take it as a sign that you’ve just discovered something new. Don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. It helps you focus less on proving yourself- and more on improving yourself.

  3. Invite Others to Question Your Thinking

    1. Learn something new from each person you meet. Everyone knows more than you about something. Ask people what they’ve been rethinking lately. or start a conversation about times you’ve changed your mind in the past year.

    2. Build a challenge network, not just a support network. It’s helpful to have cheerleaders encouraging you, but you also need critics to challenge you. Who are your most thoughtful critics? Once you’ve identified them, in- vite them to question your thinking. To make sure they know you’re open to dissenting views, tell them why you respect their pushback-and where they usually add the most value.

    3. Don’t shy away from constructive conflict. Disagreements don’t have to be disagreeable. Although relationship conflict is usually counterpro- ductive, task conflict can help you think again. Try framing disagree- ment as a debate: people are more likely to approach it intellectually and less likely to take it personally.

Interpersonal Thinking

  1. Ask Better Questions

    1. Practice the art of persuasive listening. When we’re trying to open other people’s minds, we can frequently accomplish more by listening than by talking. How can you show an interest in helping people crystallize their own views and uncover their own reasons for change? A good way to start is to increase your question-to-statement ratio.

    2. Question how rather than why. When people describe why they hold extreme views, they often intensify their commitment and double down. When they try to explain how they would make their views a reality, they often realize the limits of their understanding and start to temper some of their opinions.

    3. Ask “What evidence would change your mind?” You can’t bully someone into agreeing with you. It’s often more effective to inquire about what would open their minds, and then see if you can convince them on their own terms.

    4. Ask how people originally formed an opinion. Many of our opinions, like our stereotypes, are arbitrary, we’ve developed them without rigorous data or deep reflection. To help people reevaluate, prompt them to consider how they’d believe different things if they’d been born at a different time or in a different place.

  2. Approach Disagreements as Dances, Not Battles

    1. Acknowledge common ground. A debate is like a dance, not a war. Ad- mitting points of convergence doesn’t make you weaker-it shows that you’re willing to negotiate about what’s true, and it motivates the other side to consider your point of view.

    2. Remember that less is often more. If you pile on too many different reasons to support your case, it can make your audiences defensive-and cause them to reject your entire argument based on its least compelling points. Instead of diluting your argument, lead with a few of your strongest points

    3. Reinforce freedom of choice. Sometimes people resist not because they’re dismissing the argument but because they’re rejecting the feel- ing of their behavior being controlled. It helps to respect their autonomy by reminding them that it’s up to them to choose what they believe.

    4. Have a conversation about the conversation. If emotions are running hot, try redirecting the discussion to the process. Like the expert nego- tiators who comment on their feelings and test their understanding of the other side’s feelings, you can sometimes make progress by expressing your disappointment or frustration and asking people if they share it.

Collective rethinking

  1. Have More Nuanced Conversations

    1. Complexify contentious topics. There are more than two sides to every story. Instead of treating polarizing issues like two sides of a coin, look at them through the many lenses of a prism. Seeing the shades of gray can make us more open.

    2. Don’t shy away from caveats and contingencies. Acknowledging competing claims and conflicting results doesn’t sacrifice interest or credibility. It’s an effective way to engage audiences while encouraging them to stay curious.

    3. Expand your emotional range. You don’t have to eliminate frustration or even indignation to have a productive conversation. You just need to mix in a broader set of emotions along with them-you might try show- ing some curiosity or even admitting confusion or ambivalence.

  2. Teach Kids to Think Again

    1. Have a weekly myth-busting discussion at dinner. It’s easier to debunk false beliefs at an early age, and it’s a great way to teach kids to become comfortable with rethinking. Pick a different topic each week-one day it might be dinosaurs, the next it could be outer space-and rotate re sponsibility around the family for bringing a myth for discussion.

    2. Invite kids to do multiple drafts and seek feedback from others. Creat ing different versions of a drawing or a story can encourage kids to learn the value of revising their ideas. Getting input from others can also help them to continue evolving their standards. They might learn to embrace confusion and to stop expecting perfection on the first try.

    3. Stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. They don’t have to define themselves in terms of a career. A single identity can close the door to alternatives. Instead of trying to narrow their options, help them broaden their possibilities. They don’t have to be one thing-they can do many things.

  3. Create Learning Organizations

    1. Abandon best practices. Best practices suggest that the ideal routines are already in place. If we want people to keep rethinking the way they work, we might be better off adopting process accountability and con- tinually striving for better practices.

    2. Establish psychological safety. In learning cultures, people feel confident that they can question and challenge the status quo without being punished. Psychological safety often starts with leaders role-modeling humility.

    3. Keep a rethinking scorecard. Don’t evaluate decisions based only on the results; track how thoroughly different options are considered in the pro cess. A bad process with a good outcome is luck. A good process with a bad outcome might be a smart experiment.

  4. Stay Open to Rethinking Your Future

    1. Throw out the ten-year plan. What interested you last year might bore you this year-and what confused you yesterday might become exciting tomorrow. Passions are developed, not just discovered. Planning just one step ahead can keep you open to rethinking.

    2. Rethink your actions, not just your surroundings. Chasing happiness can chase it away. Trading one set of circumstances for another isn’t always enough. Joy can wax and wane, but meaning is more likely to last. Build- ing a sense of purpose often starts with taking actions to enhance your learning or your contribution to others.

    3. Schedule a life checkup. It’s easy to get caught in escalation of commit- ment to an unfulfilling path. Just as you schedule health checkups with your doctor, it’s worth having a life checkup on your calendar once or twice a year. It’s a way to assess how much you’re learning, how your beliefs and goals are evolving, and whether your next steps warrant some rethinking

    4. Make time to think again. When I looked at my calendar, I noticed that it was mostly full of doing. I set a goal of spending an hour a day thinking and learning. Now I’ve decided to go further: I’m scheduling a weekly time for rethinking and unlearning. I reach out to my challenge network and ask what ideas and opinions they think I should be reconsidering. Recently, my wife, Allison, told me that I need to rethink the way I pro- nounce the word mayonnaise.