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

by Adam M. Grant

In the past year we’ve all had to put our mental pliability to the test. We’ve been forced to question assumptions that we had long taken for granted: That it’s safe to go to the hospital, eat in a restaurant, and hug our parents or grandparents. That live sports will always be on TV and most of us will never have to work remotely or homeschool our kids. That we can get toilet paper and hand sanitizer whenever we need them.

This book is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.

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.

Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. 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 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 curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know.

We’re all novices at many things, but we’re not always blind to that fact. We tend to overestimate ourselves on desirable skills,

Advancing from novice to amateur can break the rethinking cycle. As we gain experience, we lose some of our humility.

The antidote to getting stuck on Mount Stupid is taking a regular dose of it.

“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.”

When our impostor fears crop up, the usual advice is to ignore them—give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Instead, we might be better off embracing those fears, because they can give us three benefits of doubt.

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.

The goal is not to be wrong more often. It’s to recognize that we’re all wrong more often than we’d like to admit, and the more we deny it, the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves.

when ideas survive, it’s not because they’re true—it’s because they’re interesting.

Discovering I was wrong felt joyful because it meant I’d learned something. As Danny told me, “Being wrong is the only way I feel sure I’ve learned anything.”

Attachment. That’s what keeps us from recognizing when our opinions are off the mark and rethinking them. 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.

“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.”

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

Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves, the happier we tend to be.

“If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot.”

When you form an opinion, ask yourself what would have to happen to prove it false. Then keep track of your views so you can see when you were right, when you were wrong, and how your thinking has evolved.

Every time we encounter new information, we have a choice. We can attach our opinions to our identities and stand our ground in the stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or we can operate more like scientists, defining ourselves as people committed to the pursuit of truth—even if it means proving our own views wrong.

“The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”

I’ll never forget the rejection letter I once received in which one of the reviewers encouraged me to go back and read the work of Adam Grant. Dude, I am Adam Grant.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof sh*t detector.”

“A logic bully,” Jamie repeated. “You just overwhelmed me with rational arguments, and I don’t agree with them, but I can’t fight back.”

A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught.

They were already well paid (read: overpaid), and if that could have solved the problem, it already would have.

A threat to our opinions cracks our goggles, leaving our vision blurred. It’s only natural to put up our guard in response—and Kelly noticed that we become especially hostile when trying to defend opinions that we know, deep down, are false.

Psychologists find that many of our beliefs are cultural truisms: widely shared, but rarely questioned. If we take a closer look at them, we often discover that they rest on shaky foundations.

“We are living in space-age times, yet there are still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds,” he reflects. “Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology.”

Much like a vaccine inoculates our physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies our psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future influence attempts.

Our role is to hold up a mirror so they can see themselves more clearly, and then empower them to examine their beliefs and behaviors.

We can all get better at asking “truly curious questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing or correcting,” journalist Kate Murphy writes, and helping to “facilitate the clear expression of another person’s thoughts.”*

A skilled motivational interviewer resists the righting reflex—although people want a doctor to fix their broken bones, when it comes to the problems in their heads, they often want sympathy rather than solutions.

The power of listening doesn’t lie just in giving people the space to reflect on their views. It’s a display of respect and an expression of care.

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.

What we believe depends on what we want to believe. Emotionally, it can be unsettling for anyone to admit that all life as we know it might be in danger,

If you find yourself saying ____ is always good or ____ is never bad, you may be a member of an idea cult.

It turns out that even if we disagree strongly with someone on a social issue, when we discover that she cares deeply about the issue, we trust her more. We might still dislike her, but we see her passion for a principle as a sign of integrity. We reject the belief but grow to respect the person behind it.

Humans, like polarizing issues, rarely come in binaries.

Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers.

Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.

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.

When we see people get punished for failures and mistakes, we become worried about proving our competence and protecting our careers. We learn to engage in self-limiting behavior, biting our tongues rather than voicing questions and concerns.

Some managers who asked for feedback didn’t like what they heard and got defensive. Others found the feedback useless or felt helpless to act on it, which discouraged them from continuing to seek feedback and their teams from continuing to offer it.

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.

when people are held accountable only for whether the outcome was a success or failure, they are more likely to continue with ill-fated courses of action.

Requiring proof is an enemy of progress.

Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance, and research shows that it can play an important role in motivating us to accomplish long-term goals.