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the ability to rethink and unlearn.
the first-instinct fallacy.
it’s not so much changing your answer that improves your score as considering whether you should change it.8
We hesitate at the very idea of rethinking.
we’re mental misers:10 we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.
Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable.
Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.
When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns. Psychologists call this seizing and freezing.11
Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.
Twelve smoke-jumpers paid the ultimate price because Dodge’s behavior didn’t make sense to them.
They couldn’t rethink their assumptions in time.
Under acute stress, people typically revert to ...
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Without my tools, who am I?”
Our ways of thinking become habits that can weigh us down, and we don’t bother to question them until it’s too late.
You may not carry an ax or a shovel, but you do have some cognitive tools that you use regularly. They might be things you know, assumptions you make, or opinions you hold. Some of them aren’t just part of your job—they’re part of your sense of self.
As early as the 1880s, scientists had begun highlighting the important role that wildfires play in the life cycles of forests.23 Fires remove dead matter, send nutrients into the soil, and clear a path for sunlight. When fires are suppressed, forests are left too dense. The accumulation of brush, dry leaves, and twigs becomes fuel for more explosive wildfires.
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 can master the art of rethinking, I believe you’ll be better positioned for success at work and happiness in life. Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to learning more from the people around you and living with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the
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Progress is impossible without change;1 and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
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.
The accelerating pace of change means that we need to question our beliefs more readily than ever before.
Vintage records, classic cars, and antique clocks might be valuable collectibles, but outdated facts are mental fossils that are best abandoned.
Unfortunately, when it comes to our own knowledge and opinions, we often favor feeling right over being right.
We need to develop the habit of forming our own second opinions.
As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions:13 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.14 We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our
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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 r...
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He might have analyzed the fund’s strategy more systematically instead of simply trusting in the results.
We move into scientist mode when we’re searching for the truth: we run experiments to test hypotheses and discover knowledge.
I’m beginning to think decisiveness is overrated . . . but I reserve the right to change my mind.
Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity.
And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are,22 the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.
The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.
Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.
When we’re in scientist mode, we refuse to let our ideas become ideologies.
In preacher mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity.
the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.
Our convictions can lock us in prisons of our own making. The solution is not to decelerate our thinking—it’s to accelerate our rethinking.
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 ident...
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The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Lacking competence can leave us blind to our own incompetence.
Absolute beginners rarely fall into the Dunning-Kruger trap. If you don’t know a thing about football, you probably don’t walk around believing you know more than the coach. It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become overconfident. A bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. In too many domains of our lives, we never gain enough expertise to question our opinions or discover what we don’t know.
“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,”
humility
It’s about being grounded—recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible.
You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present.
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.
