Before settling on her five habits of mind, Meier started with two particular ways of thinking she wanted to emphasize—skepticism and empathy. “I believe you have to have an open-mindedness to the possibility that you’re wrong, or that anything may be wrong,” she said. “I’ve always been very concerned with democracy. If you can’t imagine you could be wrong, what’s the point of democracy? And if you can’t imagine how or why others think differently, then how could you tolerate democracy?”
