Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam M. Grant

it’s not so much changing your answer that improves your score as considering whether you should change it.

Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable.

When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this seizing and freezing.

Norman Maclean wrote in Young Men and Fire,

revert to their automatic, well-learned responses. That’s evolutionarily adaptive—as long as you find yourself in the same kind of environment in which those reactions were necessary.

Wired early in life so parenting preserves former adaptive behav

habit was to use online tools to connect with people far away; once we lived within walking distance on the same campus, we figured we no longer needed the e-group.

What if we were quicker to make amendments to our own mental constitutions?

Also why reflection and retrospective are so powerful...and like changingmore general practices repeated thought allows higher perspectives of abstraction and elaboration

My aim in this book is to explore how rethinking happens.

Purpose

The first section focuses on opening ...

The second section examines how we can encourage other people to think again.

The third section is about how we can create communities of lifelong learners.

communicate better about polarizing issues

educators teach kids to think again by treating classrooms like museums, approaching projects like carpenters, and ...

The greatest tragedy of Mann Gulch is that a dozen smokejumpers died fighting a fire that never needed to be fought. As early as the 1880s, scientists had begun highlighting the important role that wildfires play in the life cycles of forests.

anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.

Find a path around cognitive dissonance

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.

What does evolution reward...tardigrade or wolf

knowledge isn’t just increasing. It’s increasing at an increasing rate.

second derivative

medical knowledge was doubling every seven years, and by 2010, it was doubling in half that time.

Greenspan says that he should’ve known better, though, because he happens to be an expert on gullibility. When he decided to go ahead with the investment, he had almost finished writing a book on why we get duped. Looking back, he wishes he had approached the decision with a different set of tools.

If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new data.

Why we will always need user research . Also you man train a model just once.

We move into scientist mode when we’re searching for the truth: we run experiments to test hypotheses and discover knowledge.

view startups through a scientist’s goggles. From that perspective, their strategy is a theory, customer interviews help to develop hypotheses, and their minimum viable product and prototype are experiments to test those hypotheses. Their task is to rigorously measure the results and make decisions based on whether their hypotheses are supported or refuted.

Pretotyping is an additional experiment

entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often.

Agile

slow and unsure. Like careful scientists, they take their time so they have the flexibility to change their minds. I’m beginning to think decisiveness is overrated . . . but I reserve the right to change my mind.

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.

the empirical pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an asset; it actually becomes a liability. The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.

One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see.

My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased” bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.

actively open-minded.

In preacher mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity. In prosecutor mode, allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat; in scientist mode, it’s a step toward the truth. In politician mode, we flip-flop in response to carrots and sticks; in scientist mode, we shift in the face of sharper logic and stronger data.

the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.

cognitive flexibility, their willingness “to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires.” The same pattern held for great artists, and in an independent study of highly creative architects.

What set great presidents apart was their intellectual curiosity and openness.

intellectual humility—knowing what we don’t know. We should all be able to make a long list of areas where we’re ignorant.

If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

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.

Apple was already putting twenty thousand songs in your pocket, so why wouldn’t they put everything else in your pocket, too?

two different teams were off to the races in an experiment to test whether they should add calling capabilities to the iPod or turn the Mac into a miniature tablet that doubled as a phone.

Sweet Spot of Confidence

Who am I not to serve?

people who scored the lowest on an emotional intelligence test weren’t just the most likely to overestimate their skills. They were also the most likely to dismiss their scores as inaccurate or irrelevant—and the least likely to invest in coaching or self-improvement.

It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become overconfident.

Unfortunately, as they gain experience, their confidence climbs faster than their competence, and confidence remains higher than competence from that point on.

We take pride in making rapid progress, which promotes a false sense of mastery. That jump-starts an overconfidence cycle, preventing us from doubting what we know and being curious about what we don’t. We get trapped in a beginner’s bubble of flawed assumptions, where we’re ignorant of our own ignorance.

surround himself with “fiercely loyal henchmen” from school and bridge matches, and to keep a checklist of friends and enemies.

arrogance is a rubber shield

Condom lol

Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the earth.” It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible. Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods.

We become blinded by arrogance when we’re utterly convinced of our strengths and our strategies. We get paralyzed by doubt when we lack conviction in both. We can be consumed by an inferiority complex when we know the right method but feel uncertain about our ability to execute it. What we want to attain is confident humility: having faith in our capability while appreciating that we may not have the right solution or even be addressing the right problem.

Her doubt wasn’t debilitating—she was confident she could overcome the challenges in front of her. Her confidence wasn’t in her existing knowledge—it was in her capacity to learn.

peers as contributing more to their teams. At the end of the academic year, they have significantly higher math grades than their more self-assured peers. Instead of just assuming they’ve mastered the material, they quiz themselves to test their understanding.