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

by Adam M. Grant

WHEN PEOPLE REFLECT on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence. The smarter you are,1 the more complex the problems you can solve—and the faster you can solve them.2 Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn.

first-instinct fallacy.

We don’t just hesitate to rethink our answers. We hesitate at the very idea of rethinking.

mental misers:10 we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.

Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.

We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt,

I did some research on this popular story recently and discovered a wrinkle: it isn’t true. Tossed into the scalding pot, the frog will get burned badly and may or may not escape. The frog is actually better off in the slow-boiling pot:12 it will leap out as soon as the water starts to get uncomfortably warm. It’s not the frogs who fail to reevaluate. It’s us. Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it.

Under acute stress, people typically revert to their automatic,14 well-learned responses.

No one had taught Dodge to build an escape fire. He hadn’t even heard of the concept; it was pure improvisation.

firefighters, though, tools are essential to doing their jobs. Carrying and taking care of equipment is deeply ingrained in their training and experience.

Why would so many firefighters cling to a set of tools even though letting go might save their lives?

Without my tools, who am I?”

adopting the kind of mental flexibility

My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live—and enable others to do the same.

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.

generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems.

A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.

those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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’re swift to recognize when other people need to think again. We question the judgment of experts whenever we seek out a second opinion on a medical diagnosis.

favor feeling right over being right.

As we think and talk, we often slip into the mindsets of three different professions:13 preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.

If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession.

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

we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong-minded and clear-sighted.

They’re supposed to be paragons of conviction: decisive and

No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.

the smarter you are,22 the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.

It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.

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

What set great presidents apart was their intellectual curiosity and openness. They read widely and were as eager to learn

why it’s impossible to tickle yourself.

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

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.

The legend of Apple’s renaissance revolves around the lone genius of Steve Jobs. It was his conviction and clarity of vision, the story goes, that gave birth to the iPhone. The reality is that he was dead-set against the mobile phone category. His employees had the vision for it, and it was their ability to change his mind that really revived Apple. Although Jobs knew how to “think different,” it was his team that did much of the rethinking.

In private meetings and on public stages, he swore over and over that he would never make a phone.

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.

The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know.

by their colleagues, supervisors, or subordinates. In a meta-analysis of ninety-five studies involving over a hundred thousand people, women typically underestimated their leadership skills,7 while men overestimated their skills.

armchair quarterback syndrome, where confidence exceeds competence.

The opposite of armchair quarterback syndrome is impostor syndrome, where competence exceeds confidence.

“The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”

In too many domains of our lives, we never gain enough expertise to question our opinions or discover what we don’t know. We have just enough information to feel self-assured about making pronouncements and passing judgment, failing to realize that we’ve climbed to the top of Mount Stupid without making it over to the other side.

“Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,”

“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.”

Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence.

Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself.